Basement
by Spiderjuice
Summary: Dinah's going through enough trauma after her best friend's death. Then comes the shock of discovering Vincent's the newest member of the Mausoleum. Can she help him pass on and get past the guilt of never recognizing the problems that landed him there?
1. But he's not emo! Really!

**A/N: People seem to tend to think Vincent's a generally happy person, but his problems with his parents seemed pretty major. Maybe no one really noticed if he was depressed because he always had Dinah, the very definition of emo, trailing along behind him. Was he secretly depressed enough to deserve his own vault in the Mausoleum? Who knows? This is just my theory, guys.**

**So this just opens with the obligatory ghost's dream. Otherwise it's got nothing to do with the Caine family. And I'm aware that the epitaph is supposed to say how to get into the dream, but I made it how to fix the problem instead. Oopsie.**

**Enjoy. Bizenghast (c) M. Alice LeGrow and "Basement", which the story is named after, (c) Puddle of Mudd. I own the Caine siblings. That's all, folks.**

* * *

_Basement_

* * *

The boy ran like some rabid creature was after him, constantly tripping over his oversized pants and just barely saving himself from a humiliating fall every other minute. Branches and twigs were tearing at his face, his ash-colored hair was matted and knotted, bangs dangling frustratingly in the path of his eyesight, and, overall, he had the look of someone who'd just been dragged out of a tar pit. But by the terrified look in his pale gray eyes you could tell that he didn't give a shit.

Finally reaching a clearing after ripping the last thin barriers of leaves and brush away, he stopped for a moment-- only a moment-- to puff for breath and point himself in the right direction, so tired out from his run he'd almost completely lost his bearings. He had thought or imagined (probably only imagined) that he'd heard the sounds of arguing, shouting, screaming, and next a loud, heavy _CRA-THUNK_ followed by a sickening half-squishing, half-crunching noise. And now he thought or imagined _(probably only imagined_) that he could hear quiet gasping and tears from all that distance away for a very brief moment. Now all he could pick up on was silence, dead silence. That and a few cicada's chirping.

But he couldn't really, right? It was only his imagination. He worried too much was all…way too much…

Several yards away was the barn, in the even larger clearing where the house sat and the field stretched out far into the distance, a depressing blanket of crushed and withered brown corn and wheat stalks. He kicked down the entrance and felt the rotting wood creak and almost give out under his weight. It was dark inside. The small bit of light which the moon gave off was shining through the window in the top level and hitting the piled hay bails, creating confusing, choppy shadows. It looked like broken glass was scattered everywhere, and the phantasmagorical pattern was making him dizzy. All broken glass, with someone cut by it, chopped to pieces by it, lying there, over there, far over there, not moving, chest having ceased the ritualistic rise and fall of the living…

The shadows were making his vision so blurry, so screwed up, that this couldn't possibly be what he was seeing.

_(She's dead. DEAD._

_No, she's not. She's not! Move! Wake up, move! Let me see that you're there, that you're with me! God, maybe you're not there at all and I'm just worrying too much again. I'm just totally delirious…_

_I should never have left. I should never have gone out there just to be away from the screaming. It's always gonna be there when I come back anyway. I'm so selfish, I should have stayed. But how could I have known that _this _would--? _

_No. Oh, holy Jesus, why doesn't she move? What's behind there? What's behind the corner? _

_Move. MOVE._

…_Oh… _Oh…_ No, no, no, _no, no, _NO! Shut your eyes. You idiot, don't look, _please_ don't look at that!_

_There's too much blood._

_Don't faint, it won't help. Why do you always have to…have to…? It's not a dream, it's real. It's real this time, and you need to stay awake so you can learn what to do…_

_No! I can't do anything! What can I--? How did it happen? What am I gonna _do??? _I'm not dreaming. WHY CAN'T I BE DREAMING_???)

The boy's knees buckled under, just folded like rice paper, and he fell spluttering to the ground, staring blankly into the space in front of him. At his dead-- dead-- _dead_…

All at once it all disappeared, just like he had prayed that it wouldn't. He couldn't see anything around him. He couldn't even do as much as think. He could only feel, and even that was rather sketchy.

Sadness, weakness. Fear. Rage.

More noises. He couldn't see, but he could hear.

Running some more, some screaming, some fighting. Shots, screams, cries.

He could feel the hands on the body he could scarcely believe was his own anymore. He felt them closing tightly around him, shaking him, punching, kicking, taking him down, without him being able to do anything to stop it, to put it all on pause just so he could take a breath.

He felt his head penetrating a glassy, cool surface, struggling to come back up and being forced down, face smashing into a hard wall of cold and unfeeling pain.

Eyes open, closed, open, closed.

_(It's a dream, it's a dream…_

_Air, _air, _AIR!_

_God, HELP! It HURTS!)_

Crying, screaming, gasping, banging.

Eyes open, closed, open, closed.

...Open…

…Closed…

…_Closed…_

_CLUNK!_

Brandon's attacker was sent to the ground with a loud grunt of pain as the heavy metal weapon bashed into his head. The sword's owner-- a tall, dark-skinned, armored boy-- squinted down at his victim in confusion, wondering why on God's green earth he hadn't been decapitated.

"Omigod, _Edrear!_" The half-guffaw, half-moan came from a tiny green cat who scrambled up onto the warrior's arm. "You forgot to _unsheathe the sword???_"

Edrear's brown eyes fell to meet with the gold casing on his weapon. He frowned suddenly, a small blush rising up in his cheeks. "Oh," he uttered helplessly as his brother cackled. Sneering, he snapped sarcastically, "It's because I'm _so nice_."

Edaniel took the hint and dove off his sibling's shoulder, still chortling softly.

Brandon rose from his limp rag doll position at the bank of the creek, hacking up a lungful of water and rubbing his (probably) broken nose, which was bleeding from its violent collision with a large, sharp rock below the surface of the water. After his attempts at wheezing for air finally succeeded and he was able to concentrate on something (anything) else, the first voice he heard was an unknown female's shouting his name.

"BRANDON!"

He shook his head and glanced dazedly upward. His double vision finally consolidated itself to reveal the figures of a petite brunette and a cat.

"Yo, Emo-Boy!" the cat impolitely addressed him.

"CATCH!" cried the girl. Brandon rose to his feet just in time to catch the weapon she'd thrown him-- a pitchfork (_the _pitchfork) still dripping with his sister's blood.

Edaniel and Edrear gaped, wide-eyed, aghast and confused, but neglected to ask questions. Dinah looked rather pleased with her own delightful morbidity.

Brandon proceeded to ignore Dinah, Edaniel, and Edrear entirely, having dismissed them as hallucinations brought on by his near suffocation. He clutched the pitch fork, which he naturally assumed he had brought there himself, and faced his father. "_You drunken bastard._"

Joseph Caine still laid on the ground, in shock from the severe hit to his head. He was alert enough, however, to hear and respond to his son's insult. "Is what I'm doing so wrong? Is it wrong that I'm a murderer now?" he mumbled almost inaudibly. He struggled to rise to his feet but fell flat in a heap again, too dizzy to remain stable. The drunkenness to which his son had referred didn't help much either. His voice grew steadily in volume, corresponding with his frustration. "You children are all murderers… _All murderers!"_

"_We-- are not-- murderers!_" screeched the boy in fury, brandishing the pitchfork with a threat that was all too real. "_Where's Danny?" _he demanded. "_Where is he, where the hell is he?! Did you do to him what you did to Andy? HUH???"_

"You're all killers…" insisted Joseph, growling angrily as he fumbled around on the ground. "You all helped kill her… Always worryin' her, never tryin' hard enough…"

"_SHUT UP_!" The anger was so powerful that he couldn't breathe. He thought his mind would explode into flame from the furious violet cloud that hung before his eyes and wipe out everything in the surrounding area like a bomb. He _hoped _thatit would.

"_Eatin' all the food!" _the drunkard bellowed. "Eatin' all the food when you_ knew _there was never enough!You're all f***ing killers! And you knew she was sick, and you just kept killing her faster! You killed your mother!" he accused. "_You did it!_"

"_Where's Danny? It wasn't our fault, it wasn't his fault, and it wasn't Andrea's fault! You're SICK! You are f***ing SICK!" _roared Brandon, too enraged to say anything else. Words weren't enough. Useless. Action must be taken.

At last succeeding in forcing his wobbling legs to support him, his senses having come back to him, Joseph marched toward his son, towering threateningly over him with his immense figure, his hand raised and prepared to deliver a ringing slap. "_Don't you dare speak to your father that way, you ungrateful brat!"_

In a sudden mind-numbing rush of fury, Brandon sent a powerful kick into his father's gut which sent the man tumbling back to the ground again. He rolled down the small drop-off leading to the very edge of the creek and landed with half of his face beneath the water. He choked and flopped over so he could breathe and sat up just slightly, as this was all he could manage.

Brandon, already there looking down at him, paused for mere seconds to look down at the man who dared to call himself his father. Then, with absolutely no hesitation, he drove to the pitchfork blades straight through his Joseph's chest. A spurt of blood sprayed from the man's open mouth as his face contorted into a pathetically comical wide-eyed expression of shock. Then, with a shuddering gasp, Joseph twitched and went limp beneath the rippling surface.

Brandon's feet remained planted at the spot, and he stood there, shuddering, his knuckles turning white as he continued to squeeze the pitchfork handle. This unintentional action further ground the points into the body until they managed to emerge on the other side and dig into the soil, pinning the dead man to the ground like some bizarre lab specimen. The frightened boy's eyes were darting around like a madman's, teeth chattering even though it was a steaming hot August night. Dinah, always sympathetic, was considering attempting to comfort him before all three mausoleum employees heard the sounds coming from the woods that surrounded the clearing.

Soft footsteps drew closer, the rustling of leaves signaling their arrival. Dinah drew back, having been made wary by the sudden unpleasant surprises that the ends of the dreams sometimes contained. Edaniel squinted into the foliage of the thick trees. Edrear, always cautious, held onto his sword.

A blonde boy a bit shorter than Brandon emerged from behind the tree trunks, seeming to come out of nowhere. "Bran?" His eyes lit up at the sight of his brother. "Hey!"

Brandon released his hold on the farm tool instantly. "Danny?!"

Daniel smiled brilliantly at him, no blood on his chest as evidence of where the bullet had gone through. He ran to meet his sibling, who was too overjoyed to do anything but merely ruffle his hair affectionately. The younger boy shoved him playfully and laughed, tears welling up in his eyes. "Oh God, Bran, I--"

"Danny?" called a smaller, higher voice. "Braaaaaaaaaaaandooooooooooooon?"

It was now that Brandon's eyes truly shone. "Andrea?" he mumbled, hardly daring to hope.

The tiny dark-haired girl came out of the trees after her brother, irritably brushing her loose bangs out of her face. The four gruesome punctures made by the pitchfork through her tiny skull had disappeared completely, as though nothing had ever happened. In an almost scolding tone the little girl cried out at him, "Brandon! I was so worried! Don't worry me like that anymore, okay?!"

"Andy!" shrieked the eldest child, openly sobbing as she ran into his arms. "How--?"

The nine-year-old reached up and pushed his face into her hair, snuggling in close. After regaining his ability to speak, Brandon produced a choked, "Don't worry me like that either, all right? Promise?"

"I promise," whispered Andrea as Danny came up behind her to squeeze her shoulders affectionately, completing the circle.

All at once the bright white light characteristic of the moment exploded in the three time-travelers' faces. They each shielded their face to keep from being blinded as they blinked out of the dream. Dinah, Edaniel, and Edrear phased back into reality within the underground hall of the Sunken Mausoleum, all blinking the blurriness from their eyes.

"Ahhh," sighed Edaniel, stretching tiredly as though he had just done a great amount of work. The truth of the matter was that he very rarely did more than provide a tad of (usually insufficient) explanation concerning the dream at its start and then proceed to either fall asleep somewhere far from the action or spend time pondering all the ways he could cop a feel without being smacked by Dinah. "So ends yet another crapfest." He sniffled sarcastically. "I do so love a happy ending!"

"Don't make fun of them!" snapped Dinah. "After all those kids have been through you could show a little more respect!"

Edaniel shook his head. "That was so cheesy it puts Wisconsin to bitter shame."

"I can't believe you gave him the pitchfork his father killed his baby sister with," stated Edrear in awe.

"I can't believe you managed to dig it out of her big apple head," snickered Edaniel who, made hungry by his cheese-tastical commentary, was now munching on a stick of pepperjack he'd magically produced from nowhere.

Dinah shrugged and looked distant. She smiled complacently. "Well, I thought it'd be significant to him."

"So you wanted to make the murder of his parental figure a truly magical moment?" offered Edrear, only partially amused.

"So somebody shares a brain cell with Emo-Boy! Oooooooooh! Dinah's in _loooooooooove_-- _Oof!_" the kitty yelped as the Goth girl smacked the top of his head gently.

"You are _annoying._"

"And you love Emo-Boy," mumbled Edaniel, unwilling to give up.

"You _can _be just a tad twisted at times, in case you weren't aware," acknowledged Edrear, not necessarily entirely meaning insult.

Dinah seemed to take it as a compliment and returned with a giggle a shy, "Why, thank you." She curtsied. Edrear rolled his eyes.

"You do seem to have an attraction to Emo-Boys, don't you?" Edaniel rattled on, chuckling. "Those of a common dementia," he teased her.

Dinah was genuinely puzzled. "Huh?"

Suddenly looking panicked, the cat turned his head away with a too-quick exclamation of, "Nothing!"

The pale girl's mouth opened to voice her confusion, then just as quickly retracted to form an 'O' as the realization hit. All in a rush, she felt pained and tried to shake it off as unimportant. It only grew. "Oh," she mouthed softly. "I see."

Edaniel turned on one paw and looked sorrowfully up at her, feeling rather idiotic. Edrear glared at him, which made it worse.

"Ah-- Well, he wasn't emo!" protested Dinah, profoundly irritated. "I mean, I should know what emo is! Look at this," she declared pointing at herself, poofy black Lolita dress and all. "_This _is the definition of emo! Vincent was not emo! And quit making fun of emo people, they're emo for a reason!" she scolded him, now managing to draw personal insult from the simple statement.

"I've never heard the word 'emo' used so many times in a row," commented Edaniel, hoping to distract her from her rant. "You know, all I meant was that he had some melancholy qualities. He--"

"And we weren't-- I wasn't attra--" babbled Dinah uncontrollably, apparently completely unaware that she was going on and on like a lunatic.

"Miss Dinah--" uttered Edrear weakly for no particular reason, as though to snap her out of it.

"And-- _Just shut up_!" Dinah Wherever screamed without warning, no longer upset or embarrassed but just plain furious. It wasn't the comment itself that bothered her-- that would have been ridiculous. It was the easy, thoughtless manner in which it was voiced-- as though the whole catastrophe had meant nothing and absolutely no sensitivity was called for-- that had her raving. "Just _shut up, you inconsiderate hunk of hairy shit! _How _dare _you make fun of him now that--? _How dare you?!?!_" she shrieked, raising one delicate fist. Edaniel winced.

"Miss Dinah!" repeated Edrear, who enveloped her fist in his palm and rubbed her hand soothingly. She sniffled.

"I was only-- I'm so-- I wasn't thinking!" yelped the green cat defensively.

"That's sure as hell right, you weren't thinking! You never think, that's the problem!" snarled his brother at him meanly while gently caressing the Goth girl's hair. "You understand that she's a tad unstable due to the whole ordeal--"

"_Unstable?!?!_" squawked Dinah in absolute indignation, turning on Edrear in another burst of anger. "_Unstable? _Now I'm unstable! That's great! I only miss him, why isn't that considered normal?!" she choked, beginning to cry. "Neither one of us is--was-- demented! His problems with his parents weren't that bad! …We're both normal, it's everyone else who's crazy! We understood each other better than anyone else is all! He understood me! …I only miss him, why am I considered unstable?! _Why isn't that considered normal?!_" The girl who'd taken quite kindly to being called twisted only minutes ago broke down in tears at the indication that she or her close friend had been anything other than ordinary.

"S-_sensitive," _said Edrear. "'Sensitive' is more the word I meant to say. I only meant…"

Quiet. Aside from Dinah's subtle moans into the white hand gloves covering her tear-streaked face, everyone in the room was completely silent. Edaniel tentatively inched toward Dinah to nudge her elbow gently with his head, much like an ordinary cat would do. Moved by this, since it was so uncharacteristic of him, Dinah's sobs diminished bit by bit until they were mere sniffles again. She hiccupped in an attempt to chuckle and scooped Edaniel into her lap. "I'm so sorry. I was being…silly. You didn't mean anything by it; we're just not used to him being… gone yet. We joke like he's still here." Edaniel, mollified, collapsed into her lap like a wet noodle, happy not to have been pummeled into dust.

Edrear approached and laid a hand on her shoulder. "I think you just needed to let all that pent up tension out. You never reacted nearly that badly the first week after." He shot a disparaging look at Edaniel. "Although the fuzz ball over there should still have known better than to mention the 'V' word."

"His name really wasn't Nathaniel?" mouthed Edaniel quizzically. Another withering glare from Edrear convinced him to shut his pointy-toothed trap.

The green cat slid slowly off Dinah's lap and landed gently on the floor as Edrear offered an arm to help her up. She gratefully clung to it and rested her head on his armored shoulder. "Thank you for putting up with me," she snickered.

"Hmmn," he hummed, flashing her a brilliant white smile. "Thank _you_, rather, for managing to put up with _us_. Particularly the fuzz ball."

Whether it was in response to the 'fuzz ball' comment or out of disapproval of this romantic gallantry just after Dinah had thrown a total fit over her precious 'Emo-Boy,' Edaniel slunk across the floor to Edrear's foot, which he proceeded to sink his teeth into. Despite how sharp they were, they didn't manage to get far through the armor. Edrear shook him off and Edaniel went flying across the room with a yowl.

"Mmn… So…" began Dinah, sufficiently calmed down now. "That was an unusually short job," she commented in an effort at returning to normalcy. "Why exactly was he in one of the more difficult vaults?"

"Yes, I know, it's rather odd. His emotional torment must have been perceived as an indicator of violent tendencies," Edrear theorized.

"He _did_ just run his father through with a pitchfork," noted Dinah.

Edrear was prevented from redeeming himself by Edaniel, who again pounced at him. Edrear ducked and the little green kitty landed on his head (probably as revenge for the kick), fully bedecked in a glittering (rather girly) spandex disco suit.

"Who cares about Emo-Boy's place in the messed-up classification system? That took, like, all of half an hour! We've got the whole freakin' night, let's _paaaaaaartyyyyyyy!_" Dinah looked upward, an exasperated expression on her face, as the lights dimmed and a disco ball appeared floating mysteriously in the center of the room. Edrear's left eye twitched. Edaniel, now with a disco fro and ready to go, thrust his right paw at the ceiling and swayed with the rhythm.

Edrear sprung up from his crouching position atop the marble floor, taking Edaniel by surprise and thus knocking the cat from his unwelcome position on his head. "_Not_ an option, Brother." With a snap of his fingers he produced a check-list from an invisible pocket in the air. "We should keep ourselves busy. Always good to have extra time to use wisely." Edaniel groaned, "_Fun sucker," _in protest. Dinah frowned disappointedly and abandoned all hope of a good night's sleep for the first time in months. "All it means is we'll be done with the whole job quicker," Edrear reminded them. This did not raise their spirits. His co-workers grunted sourly in unison.

"Well then, look at this," the guildsman offered, pointing to a highlighted note on his list. "There's a new spirit who's just recently been added to one of the easier vaults we emptied some time ago. Maybe that'd be a nice, relaxing easy job for tonight. We'll get some more work done and you can still go home early."

"I don't know about your description of '_relaxing', _Edrear, but okay, if you say so," Dinah chuckled dryly.

"Great. More emo people," said Edaniel, oblivious to his own rudeness as usual. Dinah was the one who, pausing with a satisfied smirk, kicked him this time. "Owwwwwie," moaned the kitty. "My perfect little buttocks!" Were his neck able to crane that far he probably would have kissed it. "Why am I always the victim of random violence, huh? …Hey! Don't ignore my cries of pain! …Wait up!" he scampered after them shouting.

Crossing the gloomy field of oddly-shaped headstones, they found themselves at a burial plot inhabited by a very large stone statuary in the shape of a house. It was a sizeable house, almost a mansion, taking into consideration the scale factor between it and a real house. It was surprisingly intricate too, as though someone had taken extremely great care in every finely-chiseled detail while building it. Yet it also had a cold and unloved feeling about it, indicating that it may have been taken too much for granted once finished. This was shown by the somehow gloomy nature of the expressions of the carvings on its walls-- the members of a small three-person family-- particularly in that of the child. The broken feeling the house somehow contained was accentuated by the crack down its center, illuminated by the moonlight which shone through it, a literal metaphor for brokenness. The boy-child's face was the especially unlucky one-- split down the center by the fracture that left the house just barely standing, it's once erect, proud stance a distant memory.

_Poor thing_, thought Dinah as she read and re-read the explanatory poem obligatory for every Mausoleum vault. _He was just lonely…_

"_Affection was never freely given _

_In a world where nothing was free._

_With no one to hold in halls barren and cold_

_My love's moldered, suppressed and lonely._

_I've been kept in this grave where cold-heartedness gave_

_Me this fear that now troubles my mind. _

_So open the door like no other before,_

_And show for each stone heart there' s one that's kind."_

For one moment, as she studied this unique headstone with intense curiosity, peering into the boy's deep, stone-carved eyes, the image gave Dinah a sudden feeling of cold, unutterable sadness. Then, brushing off the pity as she had learned to do after waking so many of these emotionally disturbed spirits, just as a well-practiced psychiatrist might, she switched her focus to pondering the poem engraved in the flat stone epitaph upon the bottom step leading to the house. What to do…. She shot a glance at the stone handle attached to the door and squinted. "Oh _no_," she moaned irritably under her breath. "I am feeling _way _too lazy to do this tonight." Tiptoeing up the steps to the dog-house-sized structure as though to walk normally would wake the spirit slumbering below, she peered inside the crack that nearly split it in two. The statuary was hollow all throughout. Ugh.

Dinah and Edaniel tugged together, first with genuine effort, then with a gradual lack of conviction. It took an impatient Edrear to get the stone door to budge. Pushing them out of the way with a slightly condescending grunt, he swung the rock aside as though it weighed no more than a feather. Dinah looked insulted by his attitude and Edaniel appeared envious. "Show-off," he grunted. The others ignored him. "Well, I'm still the sexy one…"

Stepping into the small replica, Dinah, Edaniel, and Edrear crouched and/or sat for a minute, blinking. Nothing unusual happened. Edrear, with a thoughtful "hmmn," reached forward and swung the stone door shut again. They waited for another minute or two, tense with the anticipation of the stone floor dropping out from beneath them. Nothing. Dinah was just beginning to feel an impatient frown tugging at her lips when she noticed that the light glowing from the other side of the crack had suddenly grown significantly brighter. Motioning with a smile to the two boys, she crawled toward the door, which Edrear kicked open effortlessly once again in a successful attempt to make his brother scowl jealously.

Dinah flung a silk-adorned arm upward to shield her eyes from the bright light that flooded her vision. Treading steadily forward into the sunlight, she noticed just a split second too late as her foot thrust forward into thin air. She tripped and fell a short distance into soft grass but banged her knee off of something hard. She yelped and held it instinctively, blinking and shaking her head as though this would wear the shock of the light and the fall away. Finally getting used to the brightness, she opened her eyes to see Edaniel peering down at her, too close for comfort, with Edrear lingering behind.

"You okay?" questioned the kitty.

"You're invading my personal bubble," complained Dinah while experimentally bending her knee. "Yeah, I'm all right, it's just going to bruise." She looked over her shoulder at the cause of her fall. Apparently they had just emerged from a tall greenhouse. The sliding door entrance, now open, led to three stone steps melding into a cobblestone walkway.

Dinah blinked, feeling an odd and altogether eerie sensation pervade her senses, giving her chills. She allowed her eyes to shift nervously side to side, unsettled and consternated. With slowly building and then sudden rushing realization that caused her heart rate to soar, she discovered that she _knew _all too well that first chipped step that had caused her fall. She recognized the style and build of the greenhouse, the way that tree limbs were allowed to extend into open glass windows as though reaching in for something, the spiral steps that connected with a normal balcony that ran along the outside. The little random trinkets and knick-knacks and piles of all sorts of seemingly useless junk that fit together to form things that actually _worked_. And to her there was nothing odd about the fact that a transparent greenhouse in the middle of someone's yard contained a bed and an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub.

It may have been that marble statuary in the center-- the headless woman, arms outstretched, feeding the birds-- that really gave her a jolt, though.

_("I got this candle stand from the transept of the cathedral."_

"…_Hmmn… I wanna go feed the birds…"_

"_Geez, contain your amazement, Di!")_

Dinah didn't remember clambering to her feet, mind numbed by astonishment and disbelief, but she stood now on the cobblestone pathway, her face more pallid that normal, eyes wide, a hand pressed to her mouth in that old archaic manner. Behind her, though she couldn't see it, Edaniel and Edrear were as surprised as she. They remembered the place too. After all, they'd just buried him here recently…

"My God… My God!" cried the Goth girl, feeling as though she would swoon. She would have been a comical sight had it not been clear that she was so profoundly disturbed by her discovery. Edaniel settled worriedly at her feet as Edrear came up from behind to steady her. Dinah relaxed and leaned against his form, at the same time hardly realizing that he was there. The hand came slowly down from her mouth, trembling slightly due to her alarm.

"_Vincent?_"


	2. He was just lonely

**A/N: So, yeah, this is sort of a big fat load of nothing. Or maybe it just feels that way to me. shrugs Dunno. Essentially, it's what I call "linkage." I need to link the first chapter to the third somehow, because I didn't really want anything to happen too quickly. The way I see it, Dinah would be so shocked to see Vincent that anything she tried to do right away would probably end disasterously, because she wouldn't be able to work to her full potential. And I wanted to talk briefly about Dinah and her Aunt Jane at the end there. So this is my linkage. Bear with it. Hopefully I will think of something interesting to happen next. **

**EDIT: So I had to go back and make some pretty sizeable changes. Mostly it was to describe the dream-world version of the house, which I felt was extremely significant. And I didn't think shoving the description in later would fit. It went best here. Somehow I forgot about it the first time around. ^^; Also, I added the very first scene, when he's sitting in the den. If it seems choppy and vague, it's meant to be. All this will piece together later, I promise. And to tell the truth, I imagine that most of the ghosts' thoughts are choppy and vague.**

**One more thing: The writing software on here gave me hell today, so if paragraphs are bunched together, sentences are cut off for no apparent reason, the italics are weird, etc, etc, don't blame me. I tried my best, but for some reason the site just WOULD NOT WORK for me today. I think it has a personal vendetta against me. Or too much traffic. One of the two. ;p So yeah. That's why. If there's anything really bad that I missed when I tried fixing it after the system did its job mangling my work, please tell me so I can fix it. Okay? Thanks. :)**

* * *

_Basement_

* * *

The blonde boy sat in one of the mansion's numerous family rooms, hunched over in his father's favorite leather recliner, hard at work on something. History notes from several weeks ago filled the previous page of the notebook and went ignored. A pencil scratched furiously against smooth notebook paper. Smudgy black lead shaded in pale white. A shape slowly took form, appropriately colored in cool blacks and whites and grays. Two wide doe eyes peered up at him from the paper surface. Carefully, he shaded those in gray as well. Their intensity grew and burned deep into him. Unsettled, he sat the notebook down in his lap, straightened, and looked up.

On another face entirely, a second pair of eyes looked down its nose at him. A flawless replica of the photograph that inhabited his parents' bedroom, the entire Monroe family grinned phonily at him from the canvas above the fireplace. His father stood the tallest, towering behind mother and son, glaring down in the direction of the chair from his position on the wall as though claiming it. _You're not here,_ Vincent thought at the painted image. _You're never here. You don't have the right to claim anything. So there. _The eyes continued to stare at him with a strange sort of contempt that may have come from Vincent's own paranoia or simply the fact that his father tended to look that way at all people, whether he liked them or not. Although whether Vincent Monroe Sr. actually _had_ the ability to genuinely _like_ anyone was questionable.

He'd recently had the strangest dream about that painting. It had seemed so _real_… And when he'd woken up, he was surprised to find it--

Vincent forced himself to halt in mid-thought, feeling… well, too much feeling. He told himself to think about something else instead.

The eyes, he'd always thought, were the most accurate part of the painting. While everything else also bore an uncanny resemblance to real life, the eyes were what really caught your attention. It was astounding what they reflected-- in some cases it was enough to make Vincent feel violated by the painter. He looked in his mother's eyes: nothing much. She was just a face and a smile, complacently residing in the present moment while failing to actually enjoy it, as though she were too good for whatever life could possibly throw at her. Vincent hardly needed a picture to remember; the eyes carried the same generic expression all the time. He rather disliked it. Next, his line of sight dropped down to his own eyes… dropped just a tad too far actually. He didn't really feel like looking there. His gaze rose up again to meet his father's eyes dead on. Cold. And, bizarrely enough, the first thing that struck Vincent was that the eyes were still intently glued on the recliner.

_Don't stare at it like it's yours. It's not yours. _Feeling belligerent now, Vincent came close to reprimanding the painting out loud but was quick enough to stop himself, embarrassed by his own overreaction to something so meaningless. But he continued to think against his will,_ Everything here is mine because you left it here with me. You didn't want it._ The eyes still gazed downward with the blatant, obnoxious look of someone declaring ownership. Inanimate object or not, it was really starting to piss him off._ Too bad. I'm sitting here, just the way you left me._ Yes, just the way they'd left him last, at home alone, sitting obediently like a dog. Waiting patiently…

Lastly, Vincent turned back to the eyes on the page in his lap. They were still watching him, still burning a hole in his exterior and finding their way someplace hidden, where they weren't supposed to be. He felt small and looked away. A few moments later, he went back to sketching the rest of the face, the body, the hair… He took a look at it when it was half completed and, with a dreary and discontented sigh, crumpled it up and tossed it to the floor. A sea of them littered the den, a ring forming around the chair. All of them bore the rough beginnings of a face, which varied slightly in minute details from page to page but had eyes that were all the same, and all looking at him, staring up at him from the floor with their accusing glances. They made him furious with himself.

He realized that he was beginning to forget what she looked like. Except for the eyes.

The eyes…

The boy noticed the portrait again out of his peripheral vision and switched his attention back to that, dropping the notebook and pencil without a thought. He'd given up anyway.

The room was so silent that he began to imagine he could hear the papers crinkling by themselves, and they said things when they leaned his head back against the chair, a vein in his head pulsing incessantly, and tried not to look at the painting above the mantel the way it was looking at him. He shut his eyes, determined. It didn't matter if the idiotic thing wanted to gawk at him because he was here alone, alone as always, and everything here was his. The room was his, the chair was his, he was his--

A spider which had been busy scurrying up the side of the chair dropped into his lap, stayed for a second, and then miraculously fell through it. Startled, it found itself on its back atop the seat of the chair, wriggling its legs comically in the air, only to reappear back in the boy's lap mere seconds later. Vincent brushed it off and, apparently not having noticed anything particularly odd but feeling rattled all the same, pulled himself up with slightly more force than necessary.

Wondering why he'd uncovered the thing in the first place after months of most of the house being kept under sheets, Vincent rescued the white linen from drowning in the moat of notebook sheets on the carpet and draped it back over the leather recliner. His father's eyes followed him the whole time, as did the dozens of tiny gray eyes on the ground, all laughing, everyone watching and no one to talk to. The atmosphere was filled with it, and it was suffocating.

Keeping his walk as slow and relaxed-looking as was possible, Vincent fled the room. (His intention was to go outside, but he wouldn't in the end.) The door closed. The eyes all kept laughing, but the silence was extreme.

* * *

"No way!" breathed Edaniel, staring up at the familiar greenhouse/cottage in awe. "I was totally kidding about that whole depression theory…"

Dinah, meanwhile, had straightened up and abandoned her former position propped up against Edrear's supporting form. Stepping slowly forward with movements that were almost robotic, she continued to gaze wide-eyed into the doorway of the glass house, paying special attention, for the moment, to the gilded bird cage which had once functioned like a basket, swaying on its rope while hanging down from the balcony, swaying almost hypnotically…

_("That reminds me! I have a present for you.")_

Her eyes welled up with tears that she hadn't even noticed were forming, and she blinked them out of the way so she could remained focused on this reminder of the past.

(_"Something for you to make dresses from."_

_"Oh...it's so...beautiful...")_

"Vincent," the dark-haired girl mouthed again.

…

With an unexpected burst of energy after her temporary stupor, Dinah began frantically rushing side to side in zigzag patterns like a squirrel caught in traffic, desperately searching for something.

"Miss Dinah?" called Edrear, concerned and confused.

"It's got to be here somewhere!" she huffed as she flapped her arms wildly to keep balance.

"Dinah, what are you--?"

She zoomed to one spot, only to stop in her tracks and abandon it for another on the other end of the yard entirely, rushing around and around until she finally wore herself out and stood still, gulping down air.

Edrear, who had by now understood what she was trying to do, walked to the spot in the grass where he remembered digging the grave and placing the angel-shaped headstone. The spot still contained a patch of fresh green grass as though a shovel had never touched it. It otherwise was perfectly vacant.

Once her oxygen supply was replenished, Dinah followed him there. At once she flung herself to the ground, getting grass stains all over her pretty dress, and began hammering her fists against the grass. "_Vincent?_" she hollered as though he were still down there buried beneath the dirt somewhere, and as though even if he were lying down there dead he would still respond. _Because he just _can't _be _here_, he can't be… _"Vincent? VINCENT?!"

"_Please_, Miss!" begged Edrear, who had heard descriptions of Dinah's fits from Vincent and recognized this as an introduction to one if not a full-blown one itself. Rushing behind her, he dove to his knees and wrapped his arms around her, forcefully tugging her away from where she was now pressed against the ground, her face buried in the green wisps of grass. "Dinah, _listen _to me!"

"It-- it's not here! Oh my--! _Ohhhh…_"

"No, it's not, Miss. It wouldn't be here because we're in his dream--"

_"No!"_

"--in which he believes he is still alive," completed Edrear determinedly through gritted teeth. "And if he is still alive, what would his grave be doing sitting here in the middle of his yard?"

The tower guard's logic didn't faze Dinah, who sat shuddering in his arms for yet another time that same night_. "No…" _she murmured. A sniffle. She shook her head, first slowly, then almost violently._ "He…can't…be…here…"_ she sobbed. "He can't be in this terrible place!"

Catching her head between his hands as gently as possible in order to stop her before she hurt herself, Edrear propped it up against his shoulder._ "_He _is_, though, dear… I'm sorry," he murmured in her ear.

Uncomfortable with how close they were once again, Dinah climbed shakily out of his arms and stood with her own arms wrapped around her chest as though cold, pacing in a circle. Eventually she broke this pattern and returned to the greenhouse, daring to step inside this time. She didn't stop to observe all the familiar mess, although in a clearer state of mind she may have liked to, but went straight for the desk across the room, searching for something that would prove the situation to be authentic, not just some trick of Bali-Lali's or a nightmare. Sifting through the clutter that hid the tabletop from view, she removed from beneath various other papers a small pencil sketch of a fair-skinned girl with dark hair and deep, dark eyes, exactly the same way and in the same place as she had last seen it. With another soft moan she slipped to her knees again, clutching it against her chest and over her heart, and sat calmly but sadly with thoughts of him filling up her head.

Edaniel came up to her as he had done before and looked her in the eyes. His were purposely wide and watery, like in a cartoon. "Cuddly kitty," he said, cocking his head to the side. Dinah didn't laugh this time, just turned away and shut her eyes. "Okay," mumbled the cat before morphing into his rarely-seen human form. "How 'bout some sexy 'Daniel action to cheer you up? Come on, what woman doesn't want this!" He did a rather undignified little dance, flexing his arm muscles and strutting around like Hercules.

Edrear snuck up behind him and tugged him away by the ear like an angry old lady. "Hey!" complained the victim before having his brother's hot-glowing eyes shoved in his face.

_"You," _hissed the dark-skinned boy,_ "_would be wise to just _shut up!_" He finished this statement with a shout, tossing his sibling backwards. The other boy's arms pin-wheeled to maintain balance.

"Hey!" snapped Edaniel again. "You have your method of comfort and I have mine! Stop being a jack-ass!"

"I thought that was your job," sneered Edrear, cross-armed and cranky. Edaniel slipped angrily back into kitty form to sulk.

With a sigh, Dinah rose to her feet, gaining both of the tower guards' attention. She brought a hand to her head, similarly to if she were checking for a fever, and brushed her hair back. Then she turned to face them, red with embarrassment. "Well," she began, shrugged, and laughed dryly and without humor, breaking off her own thought. She put a hand on her hip and faced the opposite wall. "I guess you can go ahead and laugh at me now."

"Laugh?" uttered Edrear, appalled that she would think him so inconsiderate.

"Over _what_?" Edaniel finished.

"After-- After I threw my whole fit about Vincent_ not_ being depressed in any way, shape, or form!" She threw both arms in the air and cackled like a madwoman. "Well, here he is!"

"Oh, Miss Dinah--"

"In the dead peoples'_ nuthouse, _along with all the other emo people, as Edaniel rudely refers to them!"

"Maybe we should leave," suggested Edaniel timidly, wringing his paws together, fearing yet another freak-out.

"Yes, I think some rest would do you good right now," Edrear agreed, suddenly not so worried about using their extra time wisely.

"No," insisted Dinah, her voice starting to crack again. She sucked in a deep breath and then repeated herself in a clearer, more confident voice, _"No. _If he's here, then I'm going to see him!_ Right _now! I'm going to see what's wrong!" She straightened and walked swiftly past her two companions and down the cobblestone path, arms swinging furiously back and forth as she went marching up the hill in the direction of the Monroe Mansion. "Clearly I've missed something," she said to herself. "Clearly I've made a mistake!" she called more loudly back to them.

"But Miss Dinah, what will torturing yourself prove?" Edrear voiced the question pleadingly, following a few feet behind her with Edaniel on his tail.

"Torturing myself, Edrear?" Dinah paused to think about this interpretation of her actions. "Well, for being such a terrible friend, guys, maybe I should be punished," she voiced thoughtfully, turning. "I mean, how could I possibly not have seen this?" Her arms were in the air again, and her volume was going up, up, up. "What on earth could I have missed?_ That was this fantastically huge!?"_ She huffed in frustration. "Good God, even_ Edaniel_ was able to pick up on it!"

_"_Hey! What's all this _even _Edaniel crap!" snapped the green kitty indignantly. "And honestly, I didn't pick up on _anything_! Not nearly this big anyway. I just thought he had some gloomy qualities, but I blamed most of that on working with a bunch of emotionally disturbed dead people every day! This self-blame garbage is doing about as much good as the Michigan primary!"

"No! Don't try to stop me, guys!" shouted Dinah dramatically. "This is clearly my fault and I'll handle it!" Approaching the front lawn now, she was so intently focused on the two French doors a short distance in front of her that she didn't notice the figure within the house peering curiously out the window from behind a pair of thick velvet curtains.

_(I can handle this…)_

The shape fled from view before Dinah could have a chance to see it. Meanwhile, she was looking up, seeing the Monroe house from a different perspective now. It was not really that similar to the Mausoleum model in the physical sense. It didn't _look_ like the same house. But Dinah was able to identify the same cool, dispassionate feeling that was characteristic of the model being emitted by this dwelling as well. She shivered.

_(I can handle this… I can handle this…)_

Closer. She was beginning to regret this course of action more and more now, her head spinning with all the things she could possibly say to him once she saw him-- things she would and wouldn't want to say but would definitely come flying out of her mouth together in one huge ungainly mix anyway. Crap.

_(I can…)_

Closer now.

_(…handle…)_

One pale hand was resting on the knocker.

_(…this…)_

Just as Dinah was raising the brass knocker the door swung open in her face. Ducking instinctively out of the way just in time to avoid being hit, it took her a moment to register the familiar face staring back at her, looking just as surprised as she. Dinah was so flustered she didn't know what to do with herself. Probably, in the back of her mind, she had planned on just standing there a while, staring at the door and struggling to think of a plan. _Rehearsing_ even. She hadn't meant to jump into the whole mess this quickly! _Crap_!

They stood there for a few moments that seemed to stretch on forever, their faces blank, noses barely more than a few short inches away from touching, with Edaniel and Edrear standing behind and feeling almost as mortified as Dinah. She finally drew back a little and sucked in another deep breath, trying to prepare herself. It wasn't working. _"Don't faint! "_ mouthed Edaniel desperately behind her. She made the mistake of opening her mouth. _"…V-Vincent…?"_ came out as a noise that sounded much like a dog's squeaky toy. Great.

A grin erupted on his face without warning. "Oh! Um…yeah! You must be the new girl…and gardener, and…_cat?_ Whatever, I like animals. Anyway, it's great that you got here so quickly. Teresa and Joe just sort of…disappeared, and… I was kind of starting to…get…a little… Anyway--!" he repeated himself, looking embarrassed to have revealed such large hints of his desperate desire for company to someone he believed he'd just met. The specter of Vincent Monroe turned back into the house. "Come inside! You, um…want any coffee?" With his head turned over his shoulder while walking straight ahead, he unintentionally bashed into an umbrella holder and then had to right it again while trying not to trip over it, blushing insanely and wishing he hadn't just made an idiot of himself in front of the first company he'd had in weeks. Dinah merely stood there with her lips pinched together to keep her mouth from hanging open, unable to comprehend what had just happened. "I'll just….get it, then," hacked a severely humiliated Vincent before stampeding down the hall toward the kitchen.

_"…Vincent?"_ repeated Dinah weakly.

"Gee, what happened to Nicole Kidman_?" _giggled Edaniel. The laughter died in his throat, his eyes wide and slightly horrified. "This would be_ so_ funny if I weren't totally freaked out right now."

With his initial wonderment wearing off, Edrear at last stepped forward to take control. Peering over Dinah's shoulder, he whispered, "Miss?" Dinah did not react but continued to gaze vacantly at the spot where Vincent Monroe had just stood. "Okay…" mouthed Edrear rubbing the back of his neck. "Listen._ Your_ name is _Trudy,"_ he said in a tone reserved especially for teaching immigrants English. "I'm--"

"Lucien!" Edaniel burst out, king of stupid names after having much practice at calling Vincent everything but his real one.

_"…No," _said Edrear. "I'll be…"

"Ethan's a good 'E' name--"

_"Yes,_ Name-Master!" barked Edrear.

"Okay!" Edaniel was hopping with delight at having been able to irritate his brother. "Now, who am I?"

_"_A_ cat,_ Brother," sighed Edrear in a manner that said 'dumb-shit' in every word. "You are a_ cat."_

"Oh," whined Ednaiel, ears drooping with disappointment.

"Are you ready, Miss?" whispered Edrear in Dinah's ear again, massaging her shoulders soothingly.

"Vincent?" murmured Dinah again, unable to say anything else._ "Why…?"_

_(Why can't you see it's me? Why???)_

"I-- yeah. I'm Trudy. Okay…" Dinah parroted quietly, still shaken but coming out of her trance now, sluggishly forcing one foot in front of the other to follow her two co-workers through the front door, as hard as it might have been for her to do so.

_(I can handle this…)_

Dinah Wherever set one foot inside the house and knew instantly that she could _not_ handle it. It was as though a physical shock had crackled electrically upward through her body-- directly from her toes to the nape of her neck in one rapid undulation-- the second she made contact with the floor. She recognized the staircase, curved with a frowning griffin lurking at the end of each banister and silently observing. In one great random rush her subconscious mind pulled up, contained in tiny mental bubbles, every detail concerning the tiling-- every space, every color, any and every miniscule chip. Painfully ostentatious as they already were, knowledge of the pillars, the arches-- who in bloody hell puts that kind of thing in their house? It belongs in the _Parthenon_, not in rural Massachusetts! -- flooded her. But what she remembered most, what really overwhelmed her, was the remembrance of how much he had hated it all. And just after that, niggling gently at the back of her brain, came something else, as calmly and easily as any other revelation brought forth by logical association.

"Is my sense of proportion off, or is it bigger on the inside?" questioned Edaniel, stating the thought for her. "If not, this is an impressive detail for a real estate agent to mention…" Complete with business suit and tie, Edaniel was undoubtedly ready to launch another get-rich-quick scheme into bumbling motion.

"No," mumbled Dinah softly, speaking more to herself than to her co-worker. Too busy pondering to chastise him, she instead tried to grab hold of the significance that danced tauntingly around at the edge of her consciousness. "It _is_ bigger in here… I think…" Walking slowly, she looked up and squinted, calculating approximated measurements in her head. Much like the interior of the Sunken Mausoleum, the inside of the Monroe household appeared to have been mysteriously distorted so that the ceiling, which was already ridiculously high, seemed even more elevated. The tiny vaults in the center seemed sharper, thinner; each wall stretched like elastic; every corner deeper, more pointed, more gray. Her footsteps clacked irritatingly on the marble, and the ringing echoes that resulted seemed to go on without end, like ripples in a pond sent into motion by a tossed stone. She thought fleetingly of Hill House.

_Interesting,_ Dinah mused.

Edrear hummed pleasantly. "Reminds me of home."

"Of course," muttered Dinah sourly in response_. _She turned in a slow circle and absorbed her unpleasant surroundings with a grimace. If she gazed at the ceiling cross-eyed, the way one would at a 3-D optic puzzle, she could almost begin to see how the walls were magically elongating themselves, and it hurt her head. "How awful. No wonder he always wanted to be outside…" She felt a near-debilitating wave of pity wash over her head, making her feel nauseous and chilled. "Oh…"

"Steady there," called Edaniel, darting over to her from where he had perched on is brother's shoulder and supplying a quickly-appearing human form to lean on.

"I don't understand," Dinah told them. She touched one hand to her cheek and blinked dizzily. "Why is he even in here? This place was creepy enough in real life. And it's hotter in here than it is outside," she noted, considering for a moment that maybe due to how the house had built upon itself even central air wasn't enough to reach the remote gray corners or fill the broader rooms and far-reaching hallways. Dinah shook her head and continued. "Why would he confine himself--?"

"Excuse me?"

Edaniel, with a surprised jolt, returned to animal form while the others turned swiftly to meet the speaker. With forced politeness, Vincent was still half-smiling and holding a mug, which he waved at them as though putting it into motion was the only way their eyes could pick up on it. Unbeknownst to them, this motion was partially a result of the semiconscious feeling that he'd like to dump the steaming coffee on them and run far, far away. As welcome as it was to have three more bodies filling up the black hole that was his family's house, Vincent wasn't quite ready for company at the moment, and neither was the upstairs den. He almost flushed. "There's more in the kitchen."

"Oh," said Dinah, nodding stupidly.

"Thank you," supplied Edrear.

"Meow," sang Edaniel cheerily, wiggling pointy ears with glee at the thought of more caffeine to fuel his endless drive of hyperactivity.

Splendid. He had managed to encounter the only people on the globe as uninteractive as his parents. Disappointment made him feel inward and bitter. Vincent looked at the wall. "So, I guess we should…?" he began, awkward but without as much hint of it in his voice as there had been a few minutes before.

"…Talk about…?" added Edrear.

"Business?" they finished.

Still soaking up his presence with wide-eyed awe, Dinah added, "Yes," and the syllable was endowed with just as much brilliance as everything else she had uttered within the past hour. Vincent and Edrear both eyed the faux maid disparagingly, and Dinah wilted.

Crap.

* * *

The four of them sat in the plush Monroe parlor, silent and ill-at-ease. Vincent was fidgety and constantly opening his mouth to produce a bit of cheesy small talk only to chicken out and shut it again, the perfect image of a nervous teenager. Dinah, with her ivory-white skin and completely motionless position, resembled one of the marble statuaries in Vincent's greenhouse. She sipped her beverage slowly and without interest, gawking fixedly at Vincent with a fascination more appropriately devoted to an extremely absorbing movie or work of art. Edrear looked at him more like a scientist examining a lab specimin, preparing to disect, which only made poor Vincent's anxiety worse. Edaniel, curled sleepily on the rug at their feet, was the only one who didn't feel the least bit awkward.

"So, um… Well, I'm really not at home all that much…although I have been recently… But either way, the house is too big to manage to get too much of it messed up at one time. You definitely won't need to come every day, or even every other day. Maybe every three days. A lot of it's dusting, I think, because so few of the rooms actually get used… And the pay's pretty good, especially if you only come about twice a week. I don't know the exact amount, but my parents told you in the e-mail, right? …That sound okay to you? Miss…Ms…. Erm…Trudy?"

Dinah had no clue what was coming out of his mouth, caught somewhere in a noiseless, gray blurr of confusion. Everything he said sounded like that dumb quacking noise made by all the adults in Peanuts cartoons. She nodded politely.

Edrear, on the other hand, was perfectly perceptive of everything his ex-co-worker was saying, and it _sounded_, contradictory as the idea seemed to be, like he wanted them out of the way for the majority of the time. One could see that a great deal of the work was indeed dusting, but that was clearly not as small a job as the house's occupant was making it out to be. Looking around, Edrear observed that the dust bunnies were having babies.

"And you," continued their supposed 'employer,' now facing Edrear, "well, I don't know anything about gardening, so I guess you come as many times as you think is necessary."

"Yes. It, erm, looks pretty good to me right now," fumbled Edrear, hoping to say something to hide the fact that he'd momentarily stopped listening. 'Ethan' glanced furtively toward Dinah, silently interrogating her with his eyes. _Does all of this sound right to you? Nothing odd? Miss? _

_Hello, _thought Dinah dreamily at Vincent. All of Edrear's wordless inquiries were popping up as nothing but static on the radar. For that matter, so was everything else._ No, don't say anything, it'll spoil the moment. I've missed you too. _

Vincent eyed his new gardener suspiciously. "That ivy in the back is all overgrown. I think it's planning on taking over the world."

"Oh! Yes! We came in from the front, though," Edrear lied, redeeming himself. He partook of a cursory study of the parlor and noted with interest that there were no pictures. None.

"Hmmn. Yeah, it's okay up there I guess. …Thought I saw you come from the back--" continued Vincent thoughtfully.

"We came from the front," insisted Edrear, sounding unwilling to argue. The constant interruption of his thoughts was a severe irritation. Vincent was wise enough to back off.

"Yeah, so… There's really not that much to do," concluded Vincent somewhat timidly, taken aback by the gardener's unexplained outburst. "I guess I said everything I need to."

"Then why were you in such a hurry to call more domestics in, if you don't mind satisfying my curiosity?" asked Edrear. What use were domestics to keep up a house that was barely in use? Most of the furniture was concealed by long white sheets hanging low to the ground, developing nests of dust at their bases. Everything was covered, everything but the chairs they were sitting on, and Edrear had half an inkling that those had just recently been exposed to offer them a seat. His well-trained detective's eyes followed a path to peer beneath the couch, where the tail end of yet another white cotton linen poked out and confirmed his suspicions. Curious.

"When I contacted my parents they really wanted me to hurry up with it because they're the ones who're crazy about how the house looks," was the quick and rather weak explanation. "That's not really my thing…"

"Hmmn." Edrear didn't formulate a response. There didn't seem to be a decent one in sight. If they cared about the house so much, why leave it this way? How long had they been gone? "So are you going to give us a key?"

"A key?"

"To get in." Edrear spelled it out for him like he was a toddler.

Befuddlement was clear on their host's face. "But I'll probably be home."

"You'd be in school, wouldn't you?" It was a slip like this that Edrear had been sniffing out.

"Hmmn? Oh, yeah, school, you're gonna come in the morning. I forgot." Vincent seemed oddly flustered in reaction to this. Tugging at his Three O'Clock Thieves T-shirt anxiously, he pretended to be fascinated by something outside, facing the window.

_Gotcha_, thought Edrear with a fanged smile reminiscent of a wolf lying in sly, predatory ambush in the hopes of seizing some unsuspecting woodland creature. "What about school today?"

Vincent turned around again and glared at him. "It's three o'clock, sir."

"Actually it's 2:30, you'd just be leaving." The woodland creature was making it exceedingly easy for him.

Vincent clearly did not appreciate this kind of relentless drilling. Hiding his need to scowl in a great effort at being polite, he said simply, "We had a day off. Faculty meeting."

"The school here doesn't give days off, it's a boot camp." Everyone looked across the room. Dinah had spoken, the first words she'd spoken the entire time. Why she chose this moment to pipe up, this random comment to formulate a response, was unknown. Perhaps she just needed to say _something_ to ease her own tension. Now she was stuck. She coughed and looked at her lap, toying with the folds of her dress. "That's just what I…heard."

"You people know my school times and… What???" Quite ill at ease, Vincent was seriously considering getting a court order.

"I--" Dinah paused to think, mind racing. She wanted to proceed carefully to avoid being chased away. _Anything_ but that… "I'm so sorry," she apologized. "Your parents sent us this really long message when they hired us. They sounded so worried about you being _completely_ alone out here and they kind of told us _everything_, so… Sorry to be drilling you like this, they were just so concerned I guess it had a brainwashing effect on us," she finished with a phony chuckle.

"…W-_ow_," uttered Vincent. Dinah blinked nervously. "That's _really_ creepy that they did that. _Really_ creepy…" He looked down at the pillow directly next to him on the sofa as though memorizing its design. He looked puzzled. When he finally returned his eyes to them, however, he looked more irritated than muddled. "Yeah. I guess they would be worried," he said with a half-smile that looked awfully fake. It more closely resembled a sneer. "Wouldn't they?"

Dinah had realized too late that this was the wrong thing to say. She looked a tad guilty now, knowing that she had made him feel worse, more lonely than before.

Vincent stood. "I… I don't know when you guys wanted to start. You don't need to do anything today if you don't want--" He sounded less truly generous and more like he just wanted them to leave. In truth, he was thinking about the two badly-clashing facts that, one, the maid was here to clean, and two, there was an ankle-deep mess of papers in the upstairs den covered in obsessively-drawn versions of his former best friend's eyes. But to his guests, his feelings of irritability and embarrassment were totally unexplained.

"Don't get any benefit out of being overly hospitable to your workers," Edrear chastised him teasingly. The guildsman's curiosity had been peaked; by this point he was eagerly preparing to begin ripping the house apart the way his brother would a yarn ball Vincent tried not to glare at him again.

"Yes, and we've really enjoyed meeting you," enthused a suddenly active Dinah, bouncing up from her seat with a pleading look on her face.

_(Please let me stay. I'm so happy to see you. Please…)_

The blonde teenager looked skeptical of this unexpected bout of interest from the woman who'd been as lifeless and apathetic as a mannequin moments ago. "Hmmn. Yeah, I'm sure. Pleased to meet you, too," he offered, mostly to appease her. The crazy woman was starting to seriously grate on his nerves. He all too clearly wanted them gone. Something had made him feel aloof enough to overpower the normally dominant feeling of loneliness.

"Oh," murmured Dinah in a hurt voice. "I see."

"Thank you for inviting us in," returned Edrear politely, scooping the sleeping green cat up from the floor. "We'll start tomorrow. Leave us a key under the mat, would you?"

"I'll remember," assured Vincent, moving forward as though ready to start pushing them physically out the door. Edrear saved him the work by nudging Dinah gently toward the exit, despite her clear desire to stay there with her feet glued to the floor, content just to be in the same room as the friend she missed so much. She found herself outside on the porch looking in all too soon, searching to no avail for something she could say that might convince him to let her stay.

"It was… it was great to meet you," she said, still trying to play the role of clueless, unaware Trudy the maid. "You're a very nice young man." It was so hard pretending she didn't know him, after they had been so close for so many long, grueling years, brightening up each other's lives in this gloomy, god-forsaken ghost town.

"You already said that," he pointed out from the already half-closed door, smiling. Smiling, smiling. Maybe if he kept smiling the snoops would be convinced that it was all just fine and would leave him alone. For good. (That _was_ what he wanted, right?) The maid did, however, look quite wounded, and Vincent suddenly felt guilt tugging at him. He managed to produce a smaller but more realistic smile and aimed it at her as a means of apology.

"Yeah…" His smile to her was more genuine, she noticed, than the shamelessly fake one he'd aimed at nosy 'Ethan' the gardener. She was glad for that. "Goodbye," she uttered helplessly.

Before she realized what was happening, his hand was grasping hers in a friendly handshake, surprisingly friendly considering how standoffish he'd acted a minute ago. Dinah wasn't given a chance to shake back. He pulled away before she could think to. She looked down at her hand. It felt warm.

"See you," he said and shut the door, giving her a split second to see his face one more time before said obstacle blocked it. Dinah was left frozen on the doorstep, heartbroken.

"Come on, Miss. Let's take you home," Edrear said, breaking her out of her thoughts. She made a point of letting him take her other hand as he pulled her away.

"What the hell'd you have to wake me up for?" grumbled Edaniel from somewhere that sounded very far away.

"Shut up," grunted his brother back at him.

She kept on watching the house even as it phased into the distance, farther and farther away, as Edrear took them out of the dream and home again.

_

* * *

_

Dinah's thoughts rang with different theories and comments she and her two friends had made as she took her leave of the Mausoleum. She wanted to find some sliver of reason in this whole ridiculous wreck she'd unknowingly walked into.

("_Why would he not recognize us?_ _He's_ worked _with you! He_ knows _me! Why???"_

_"The dead often become very confused, Miss, especially those in as miserable a state as our 'clients.'" Edrear was silent and thoughtful for a moment. "Maybe it would be too emotional for him to see you, bringing back memories of his death, and he doesn't want to believe that he's not alive anymore. To see us there with you in the morning for some reason and clearly on Mausoleum business would undoubtedly refresh his memory. Plus, he probably sees a version of you at school. Where would your double have come from?"_

_"He hasn't been going to school," Dinah acknowledged. "Why not, though?"_

_"I certainly don't claim to know. I don't understand most of what's going on here, to be honest," admitted her protector. Edrear recalled with great consternation the sudden display of warmth Vincent had shown 'Trudy' on her way out the door. "He can't seem to decide whether he wants us there or not." The warrior stopped in his tracks and reflexively rubbed at the back of his neck. "And the house…" he began, not knowing nearly where to start._

_"…Do you think this has something to do with me?" a soft, worried voice interrupted. Dinah twirled one coffee-colored curl around her index finger anxiously._

_"Why would you think that?" asked Edrear, sounding surprised._

_"It's just that he knows me_ so well... _Why would he want to block me out? Could there be another reason, an extra reason, you think?"_

_"We'll have to find out."_

_"Hey, he _did_ block us out too, you know!" Edaniel reminded her._

_"That's just because you're annoying," teased Dinah, smirking at him. She thought that maybe a joke would make her feel better. It did for a small moment, then faded away again.)_

She wondered if she would ever feel truly happy again. Oh, she'd wondered that _before _Vincent died, but now she realized just how much better off she had been while he was still alive to bring her some joy in her messed up life. Now her feeling of insignificance and loneliness was even more powerful, at times completely overwhelming her. And she did have more fits now. _  
_

Vincent had made the visions go away. Once.

_("…Dinah?"_

_"Hmmn?"_

_Edaniel paused in his tracks and squinted into space. "Going by what you two have just repeated to me… Do you realize that you've just set things up so that he only expects you every three days?"_

_Edrear blinked, then growled. "Ugh!" The little green kitty laughed derisively at him. The warrior scooped the cat up and held him directly in his face. "Why hell would you not mention this until now???"_

_"I'm a cat remember," snickered Edaniel even as he was dropped to the ground. "I can't give business advice."_

_"You were sleeping the whole time, you little runt!" Edrear scowled and grunted. "This is going to take a while, I can see.")_

_Every three days, _thought Dinah miserably. Three days between every time she'd get to see him. Aside from the short break from now 'til tomorrow, she would have to go for three nerve-wracking days wondering what was wrong, between each and every visit.

What _was_ wrong???

_("I wish it were easier to tell how much torment he's being put through. Damn you elusive teenagers and your hidden angst!" Edaniel cursed all adolescent-dom. "I'm kind of getting a feel for how a psychologist feels when their patient just sits there like a brick wall. Aggravating."_

_"Yeah, well I understand how it feels to be said patient, so give it a rest already, won't you, Edaniel?" Dinah commanded him crankily. "Besides, you only really heard about it second hand, how do you have the right to be frustrated?"_

_"Yeah, I guess…"_

_"I just don't understand," Dinah continued with a sigh, hand pressed to her forehead again. She felt sick. "I didn't think his problems with his parents were that bad. I didn't think he was so lonely…"_

_"You can't expect to know everything about a person, Dinah," said Edrear comfortingly, "no matter how close you are to them."_

_"Yes, I understand. But he knew almost everything about me… I never realized how little he actually told me about himself." Dinah looked up at the moon, feeling small and stupid. "We always talked about my feelings. And I have so _many_ feelings that they'd take up most of the time. After a while, maybe I simply managed to brainwash myself into believing Vincent didn't _have _feelings of his own. Not on purpose of course, but subconsciously maybe…"_

_"Perhaps he didn't _want _to talk about anything, Dinah. I get the feeling he cared an awful lot about you. He probably thought that mentioning any problems he had would only succeed in making you feel worse yourself."_

_"Yeah," said Dinah. "He worried too much about me. Look where it's gotten him."_

_Edrear stepped in front of her, fully capturing her attention. "I want you to promise that you won't drive yourself insane over this," the tower guard implored. "You've got too much to worry about concerning yourself. Only spend as much time as is necessary pondering over Master Vincent's dilema. I don't like saying this because I _did _enjoy his company--"_

_Edaniel rolled his eyes. They'd fought tooth and nail over a certain doe-eyed Goth girl._

_"--but all the same we need to treat this like business as usual. Do you understand?" the dark-skinned boy questioned her, staring deep into her eyes. "Do you?"_

_Dinah looked him squarely in the eyes, so closely that she could focus entirely on her reflection floating inside his pupils. "Yes. I won't," she said, her voice quiet but strong with no hint of hesitation in her voice.) _

_Such lies, _thought Dinah._ I'm far too good at lying. I never wanted to become a liar. _She knew that she would think of him every day until he was gone from the vault, and still every day after that. It was Edrear's greatest fear and Dinah's greatest liklihood that she would spend the rest of her life haunted by an endless parade of guilt and self-accusation. Or maybe not. Maybe, in time, she would develop a hard enough heart to manage to forget about him. But that would be worse.

_("…show for each stone heart there's one that's kind…")_

_I won't forget. I won't hurt you again, _thought Dinah determinedly as she climbed clumsily up to her window and slithered inside, wishing for a helpful hand to push her up. She tumbled into the room and onto a pile of decorative pillows. Lying flat on her stomach, she rolled over onto her back to look up at the ceiling, blowing a single black-brown curl out of her face.

_(I'm going to fix you…)_

She heard footsteps out in the hall heading toward her room. With a jolt and a gasp, she shot up just in time for Aunt Jane to open the door, fully bedecked in a baby blue fuzzy bathrobe and slippers, with bed head to match. The blonde woman blinked and yawned drowsily, having just awoken from a two-hour long nap after a night of watching soap operas she didn't even like. She squinted blearily at Dinah. "Jesus God, are you still _awake_?" she exclaimed.

Dinah shrugged and crossed her legs lazily as though she'd been lying there for quite some time, just staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

"Oh, geez, it's almost two o'clock in the morning!" groaned the woman after a cursory glance at the digital clock on her neice's bedside table. "You don't even have your pajamas on yet?" she said, shaking her head. Her niece was a wonder.

"I fell asleep over here. Anyway, it is a weekend."

"You fell asleep doing what? Making shadow puppets on the ceiling like a five-year-old?" Dinah grinned cheesily, pushed her two thumbs together, and flapped her two open hands in the likeness of a butterfly. "You are a strange kid, Dinah," Jane acknowledged. She peered over Dinah's head and released a sudden loud groan. "Ugh! Dinah! Why is the window open, the air conditioner's on!"

Di tilted her head all the way back over one of the pillows so as to gaze sweetly up at Jane with two precious doe eyes, her face expressionless. The picture of innocence.

"Hmmn," Jane hummed, eyeing her niece suspiciously. She slammed the window shut. "Remember to keep that closed would you now? Little idiot," she snorted, reaching down to ruffle Dinah's hair affectionately. She would often be sarcastic this way, acting more like a big sister than a parental figure.

Jane walked to the doorway and stretched dramatically, a comical sight in her bed-wear. "Well, I'm going back to bed. You can tire yourself out as much as you like. You really should try to get more sleep, Dinah. I think sleep deprivation is really a very large part of what makes you so excitable at times."

Di rolled her eyes. "Sure, mom." She refered to her aunt as 'mom' sometimes. Lately it had become a more genuine term of affection for her guardian. Right now it was tinged with sarcasm.

"Hmmn…" The robed woman turned. "Why don't you sleep in tomorrow, and then we could maybe go see a movie or something. We'll have a nice lazy day. I've been put under a lot of stress at work lately, so I'd enjoy that."

_Yeah, you're telling me, _thought Dinah derisively.

"So how about it?" Aunt Jane was shooting Dinah a genuinely friendly smile through her sleepy haze.

"Oh. You know I really had something I wanted to do tomorrow…" said the Goth girl in as much of an apologetic tone as she could muster.

"Yeah, like what? Just sit like a lump all day and then mysteriously come alive at night like a vampire like you have been recently? It's kind of creeping me out."

"Yup," mumbled Dinah almost inaudibly, cozying up against the pillows and shutting her eyes. "I'm creepy. 'That creepy girl…' "

Clearly stung by this sort of rejection and disinterest, Aunt Jane's hand instinctively went to her hip. Then her expression softened and the hand came down again. "Dinah, I really would like to spend some time with you," she said, her voice sweet and coaxing. Finally, the sugar went out the door. "Look, Dinah, you can't blame me for feeling a little concerned. You've just been so blue lately since…"

Across the room, one indigo eye opened.

"…that friend of yours died," finished Jane a bit timidly, afraid of what reaction she might get. Nothing. Silence. Her head dropped just a tad, gaze dropping to her slippered feet almost guiltily. "You know, he really was a nice boy, I wish I would have spoken more with him--"

"You hated Vincent," remarked Dinah bitterly, both eyes squeezed shut again. She was trying to look disinterested, although one couldn't have picked a topic that would rile her more. "I thought one day you were gonna throw a vase at him just for tugging the bell pull more than once. That thing's been disintegrating for years, it's not his fault it's a wreck--"

"This isn't about the damn bell pull!" Jane interrupted angrily.

"Well, you certainly cared more about an inanimate object that you cared about him."

"I didn't _know_ the kid, Dinah!"

"Which is _why_ I'm _saying_," Dinah continued logically, her voice calm but her teeth gritted, "that you shouldn't blurt dishonest garbage like that. Talking about what a nice boy he was isn't gonna help him or me now, whether you're being sincere or not!" Her volume had risen steadily throughout the sentence so that she ended her statement with a bark. "You know, maybe if more people had been sincere towards him, he wouldn't have been so--" She realized too late that her eyes were growing moist again, and now she couldn't do anything to hide it. Dinah huffed, embarrassed, angry, and heartbroken over her friend's plight all over again. "It's 2:00AM, _good night_!" she shouted, quickly moving forward to slam the door in her aunt's face.

"But Dinah--!"

_SLAM! _"Good night, Mom!"

There was immediately a series of quick, desperate taps on the door. "Dinah, I didn't mean anything by that!"

The lock clicked. _"I said good night, Jane!"_ hollered Dinah through the door, reverting to calling her guardian by her first name as she often used to. Squeezing her eyes shut as more tears spilled out, she released a high, miserable wailing noise and flopped face first on her bed.

Dinah cried herself to sleep, and Jane stood out in the hall in a stupor for a good five minutes or so before finally wobbling sleepily off to her bedroom, where she slept fitfully for the rest of the night and awoke feeling as if she had never shut her eyes in her life.

* * *

**A/N: One little note: Yes, I know everyone thinks Vincent is in Europe. But I started writing this story about one month before book five came out, so I didn't know yet. And I liked this moment so much that I never bothered to change it. It'll be good for the story. You'll see. ;) So anyway, that's the reason why it's not canon, in case you were wondering.**

**Hope you like! After all the misery I went through trying to post this (the software won't behave today), if you don't I think I'll cry. You don't want to make me cry, do you? **


	3. Junk

**PLEASE LOOK AT CHAPTER TWO BEFORE MOVING ON TO THIS ONE. I EDITED IT. A LOT. JUST LETTING YOU KNOW.**

**Yeah. So I had to go back and make some pretty sizeable changes. Mostly it was to describe the dream-world version of the house, which I felt was extremely significant. And I didn't think shoving the description in later would fit. It went best here. Somehow I forgot about it the first time around. ^^; Also, I added the very first scene, when he's sitting in the den. If it seems choppy and vague, it's meant to be. All this will piece together later, I promise. And to tell the truth, I imagine that most of the ghosts' thoughts are choppy and vague.**

**One more thing: The writing software on here gave me hell today, so if paragraphs are bunched together, sentences are cut off for no apparent reason, the italics are weird, etc, etc, don't blame me. I tried my best, but for some reason the site just WOULD NOT WORK for me today. I think it has a personal vendetta against me. Or too much traffic. One of the two. ;p So yeah. That's why. If there's anything really bad that I missed when I tried fixing it after the system did its job mangling my work, please tell me so I can fix it. Okay? Thanks. :)**

**So here's Vincent. Oh, and remember to read the other author's note at the end. It might clear some things up for you. I don't know if it'll be becessary or not, but just in case.**

* * *

_I wonder, _he thought silently to himself, _if it would hurt._

Vincent Monroe stood alone outside on the second story balcony of his house. The oppressive sunlight was gone, hidden behind the clouds, and a blessedly cool breeze swept through the trees. He'd been inside for more time than he'd ever pictured himself spending in the God-awful place, and finally he hadn't been able to stand it anymore. Now that he was out here, though, he was surprised to find that he honestly didn't feel much different. Not worse, just entirely unimproved.

He'd woken up that morning at nearly eleven o'clock. For any other teenage boy this would be normal, particularly on a weekend. For him, sleeping half the day away was unheard of. He was up by eight on a Saturday or Sunday morning (closer to eight thirty after he'd begun servicing the Mausoleum at night). By nine he was out biking around the town, collecting more obscure knick-knacks and do-dads to add to the ever-expanding pile in his greenhouse. By twelve he was back home, eating the lunch that half the rest of America wasn't eating until nearly two o'clock, or maybe not at all, only for Dinah to show up an hour later asking for some of whatever he'd finally thrown away thirty minutes ago.

Dinah…

He would spend most of the day with Dinah after that. In the greenhouse.

The greenhouse…

He hadn't set foot in the greenhouse in…God knows how long…

Maybe he just didn't want to anymore.

And that was what had surprised him upon waking that morning, more so than the lateness of his rising itself-- the fact that he had been almost completely unaffected. Sleeping 'til midday in a sweaty, snoring lump on his couch should have made him feel like a lazy slob. Waking up to realize that he would have to pass on his favorite activity because he had already reached the hottest part of the day should have made him frustrated and outright pissed off with himself. And, over all, he _should _have been _hungry. _Riding six miles per day to school and back on weekdays, with an extra several tacked on considering the Mausoleum every night _and _his beloved hobby, worked up one hell of an appetite. Most of the time. But now…

Now he wasn't going to school anymore.

_You see, _he scolded himself_, how quickly your body adapts to that?_ Vincent was not a health freak by any means, but neither could he tolerate inactivity. Up until now. Up until now, when he dozed off regularly, sleeping the way a cat does whenever there's nothing better to do, which at this point was most of the time. Up until now, when he'd grown increasingly less interested in exploring, in going to school or otherwise doing anything useful, in talking to people-- anyone, really-- or even in simply greeting the light of day each morning and forcing himself to decide what to do with his life. He should have been concerned. He should have panicked at the idea that nothing mattered to him anymore, that he was slowly morphing into a fat, armchair-ridden drone like one of the blob people from _Wall-E_. He should have been completely in awe of the fact that his stomach didn't growl at him once, despite the fact that he normally shoveled down food with all the ferocity of a frenzied shark in the morning. The fact was that it just didn't seem to matter anymore. Eating and everything else. And he should have been upset. _Horrified_ even.

But he wasn't. He was merely confused. Confused, but impassive. Much like he was feeling right now, out on the balcony in the fresh air, which usually made him feel so much better and brighter. Vincent hated spending time indoors. But now that he was inexplicably turning into a mole, no time was wasted on determining why. He had decided that these were the facts and that he would deal with them without fighting. All his fight had disappeared somehow, in the past few weeks. And he didn't wonder about that either. Anymore, he spent time wondering about other things entirely. Some of them he'd regarded briefly a few times before in his life, others he hadn't. Now, with his arms folded on the ledge, chin planted atop them as he gazed vacantly down at the brick walkway, he realized he couldn't remember which of the two categories this particular idea fell into. All he knew was that the sidewalk was suddenly unexplainably fascinating.

Vincent did not approach the subject of suicide in the manner that most people did, with lots of dramatic moaning and groaning, plotting and planning, struggling against the tempting darkness only to wilt in its shadow and let it overcome you once again. He was interested in none of these clichés and time-wasters. It was Dinah who was the artist, who would make a proper statement out of something like suicide. Somewhere, hidden alongside the eccentric taste in clothing and love of architectural aesthetic, Vincent still possessed an exceedingly practical side which considered the choice to kill oneself to be as commonplace and unemotional as picking what to eat for breakfast in the morning. Much like a business decision. Everything was business. Nothing was important. _Gee_, he wondered sarcastically, shaking his head, _where could I have gotten that mentality from? _Where indeed. Ha.

It was just a simple weighing of the scales. On one side, be alive and, through the unyielding misery, hang onto the shred of fragile hope that a day might finally come along when life doesn't suck. On the other, take a nose dive and splatter against hard pavement-- steaming hot enough in the summer to fry your pretty face like an egg-- and for the rest of eternity feel absolutely nothing at all. Oftentimes the answer seemed incredibly simple, but when you were _useful_… well, then the first option had just a little more weight added in its favor, and it would win. Because when there was something important to _do _with one's life there was always that chance that life might suck gradually less and less until someday it stopped sucking altogether. Because somebody wanted you…

Vincent started to sigh but ended up snorting irritably instead. On other days, the nothingness seemed an immeasurably more sensible option.

Vincent looked outward instead of downward for a minute or two, taking in the colorlessness of the landscape. The grass had dried up and grown longer, almost knee-length now. It had been like a jungle out there since Joe left. Vincent certainly wasn't in the mood for taking care of it himself. This mysterious abhorrence of activity he'd acquired made it seem an even more repelling task than usual. Ah well. It didn't matter. No one was around to gripe about it. The grass could leap out of the ground and swallow the house whole for all he cared. Stupid place was too huge for one person to live in anyway.

And yet he did-- live there, that is. And maybe the grass and weeds _would_ wind up the walls and cover the windows like bars, block all the light, and suck the place down into the Earth, if only to keep the company, leaving him with nothing to do but sit alone in the dark, in his father's chair, and draw eyes--

_(Stop. Please.)_

He wondered how long it would take for someone to comment-- a paper boy, the two dingbats who showed up on his doorstep the other day. The ones in front of whom he'd managed to make a complete idiot of himself. (Damned maid had just gawked at him.) He thought of when they'd finally ask him why he wasn't going to school. When the _school _would ask him why he wasn't coming to school. What would any of them do anyway? Call his parents?

The very idea made him laugh out loud with genuine amusement. Call his parents? Great idea! Applause for you, little monkey! Because the most advanced GPS system, the most complex space satellite, could apparently not pick them up in their mad scramble to escape from the everyday world. They were sending _telegrams _at this point, for God's sake! How much farther from civilization could they possibly get? Vincent thought of his upper-class, luxury-loving mother and father in the middle of the jungle someplace, crammed into a beaten-up old hermit's shack with no electricity, and almost doubled up with laughter. Then he realized that, like well-trained hounds, they could probably manage to sniff out first-class accommodations no matter where they went. He wouldn't be surprised if his father were to have a hotel built just to stop his mother's whining. Ha-ha.

_Yes, yes, by all means. Go construct a hotel, or another house for that matter. Not like you already have one back here in Massachusetts. With a kid sitting in it, waiting obediently like a dog. Right?_

In his head, his parents were nodding, delighted by this logic. Yes, yes, and the pool should go here!

The image was no longer funny but irksome and disgusting. Vincent banished it from his mind with force. He'd come full circle. And for just a minute there, he thought that he'd actually found something he could laugh at.

…And this was the way they liked it anyway, wasn't it? Him, indefinitely at home to run things, to tell the gardener to put in the perennials, to discourage burglars, to pay bills for them, etc., etc., etc. Why go to school? If he was going to be no better than somebody's butler all his life, what education could he possibly need? Why leave the house at all, if it was all he was meant for? Why not be buried alive with the rest of the ruins? Why not?

Call his parents? _Ha!_

…He wondered how long it would take…

Vincent looked down again. One weighing of the scales leads to yet another more challenging question: Be alive with no one around to care about it, or be dead with no one around to care about it? Philosophical if slightly life-drained look in his eyes, he considered. Then, with a shrug, he decided on being alive for a little while longer, if only because he wasn't dressed for suicide that day. Why ruin a perfectly decent pair of khakis? The thought made him chuckle out loud. Maybe his sense of humor was more morbid than Dinah's after all. Yeah, he could definitely imagine that. He thought of the deer.

_("Who would care? Let's go.")_

_Yeah, really-- who would care?_ Vincent asked himself. _The dingbats, _was the answer. But that was only because it meant that they wouldn't get paid-- why clean a house with nobody living in it? It was exactly the same deal. No one cares about the fact that the deer's skull just got crushed in. They're more worried about whether their insurance will cover the damage done to their front grill.

_Don't be like that_, Vincent chastised himself. _They must need money too. Maybe they have kids to support. Maybe they care about them…_ He elected to make an effort to be more accepting of Ethan and Trudy. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

Vincent lifted one hand and eyed it pensively. The human contact had felt so strange, and even more absurd was the way he'd been overtaken by the impulse to grasp her hand at the doorway. Regardless of whether this was in fact the right hand-- right, left; there was no way to notice when in the grip of an irresistible urge-- he scrutinized it for any miniscule difference he could find in it between now and the day before. Vincent had gone so long without touching another living person-- how long had it been, exactly?-- it seemed appropriate that the hand in question should now either whither or glow. He couldn't be certain which.

_(Glow?)_

He winced, feeling his own fleeting ideas prick him like so many pins. What? Because for some unknown reason he had liked her, though she barely said a word to him, her touch should be that important? Vincent grunted. It might as well have been the gardener. Or the cat. Ha. For all she cared. …Why _would _she care?

There was someone else who would care.

Would've cared.

_(Damn.)_

The greenhouse stuck out at him past all the gray. Color there. Remnants of color, at least. He'd once held it up on a pedestal, considered it his haven. He'd once described it as his "real home," dismissing the lavish mansion on the hill like an unwanted toy. Had this made him crazy? He couldn't be sure. Vincent didn't feel any more sane after residing in the actual Monroe house for the past few weeks. He wondered if it would be a good idea to go out and visit the greenhouse again.

_(After…?)_

Would it be the thing to break through the bizarre, emotionless take on reality he'd been experiencing or make him even more…?

A wry grin flashed across his face.

_(What? Hopeless? Is that what this is? I couldn't tell.)_

The greenhouse was hope. The greenhouse had vanished for him, leaving in its place this cold, unappealing hunk of metal, glass, and however many other combined materials, all sloppily hammered together in the hopes of creating something useful out of complete uselessness. It wasn't his home anymore. It didn't contain anything special. Just…

_(Junk.)_

The word choice left Vincent with a humorous expression, eyebrows raised over widened eyes and a twisted half frown. Junk? Didn't he remember saying once-- _insisting _with fiery zeal, in fact-- that it all was most certainly _not _junk? Insisting to--

_(Dammit!!!!)_

Drawing in a long, deep breath, Vincent hunched his shoulders and glared at the ramshackle building across the lawn as though he could fell it with his eyes. After a few moments of internal deliberation, struggling against the outrageously compelling urge he felt to retreat inside the house again, he made his way through the adjoining room and down the steps. He was on his way to… _confront _it. That was probably the best word. He wanted to confront these unfamiliar feelings of…

_(Complete and utter desolateness? Ha-ha. Wow. Di's sure met her match, hasn't she?_

_DINAH.)_

The word exploded like a bomb every time he thought of it. His hands almost flew to his head. Just to think the name made him ache. He just wanted to get _rid _of it!

There. That showed that he cared a little, right? This surely meant that he was _not _an unfeeling, detached lump, merely taking up space in the world. This showed that it mattered to him, that for the first time it was apparent that it was both unusual and horrible that he'd…gotten this way. The emptiness wasn't completely impenetrable.

Thinking about it, though, maybe he preferred the emptiness… To this…

Vincent had arrived at his destination, and he stood with a look of fixated wonder at the greenhouse, once so beloved. It was abandoned now, it and all the things inside. The things he'd cherished. The things he'd promised to take care of. How had it become this? This…_heap _of _crap _littering the space like some sort of graveyard? Yes, a graveyard. Something had died here and left its stink to mark the area where it had taken its final gasping breaths. Something had invaded this place, invaded his _mind_ and changed it.

…He knew what was missing.

The house was missing… Well, the house was missing absolutely _anyone_, that was the problem with the house. (_Stupid place, too big for one person to live in…) _The greenhouse was missing--

_(Shut up!)_

Vincent took a step inside, battling the emptiness. He was here now. The structure wasn't entirely hollow anymore. He looked around him. Toppled, unkempt piles littered the area; a few panes had been knocked out of the roof, shattered in tiny, frail-looking shards at his feet. One of the storms must have disrupted things a bit. Should he feel bad? Probably not. After all, it was only a bunch of…

_(Unwanted, unneeded, unloved, unnoticed--)_

He walked past it, his head slightly bowed as though guilty. He wasn't feeling guilt-- well, not so much. Something else was there. Something big and dark and uninvited had slipped in.

(_--unwelcome, undesirable JUNK. So easy to forget--)_

Something crinkled beneath his foot. Vincent looked down. A paper lied innocently on the floor, waiting for a hand to help it. Vincent bent down and grasped it in his hand. It was blank on the side he'd stepped on. He turned it over and felt a ripping inside of him as though he were the one made of paper.

It was her.

_(So easy to forget, so easy to forget, so easy--)_

His insides felt cold.

So where was she now? Huh?

_(--soeasytoforgetsoeasysoeasysoeasytoforgetsoeasytoforget--)_

Vincent stared down at the paper girl and was completely silent, but for the way his eyes sporadically widened, blinked, and averted their gaze, it would have seemed that somebody else was talking and only he could hear.

The tack board was hanging above his desk. That was where it had come from, he remembered. Stiffly, Vincent took a few steps forward and retrieved one of the numerous pins from the cork, and then he paused and glanced furtively at the picture again. He didn't want to focus on it for too long. But somehow it drew his attention anyway, and soon he was gawking at it with such rapt concentration he could almost feel himself falling into it, like Alice into the rabbit hole.

_(--soeasysoeasysoeasytoforget--)_

The tack in his hand. Her face, her eyes looking at him… It would be--

_(soeasy_)

--to take that look out of her

_(their)_

eyes.

_(--soeasytoforget--)_

Remember?

Not today anymore. The room is dark… Take something sharp… Heat running up in tiny spikes… Wind back...

_(--forgetforgetforgetfor--)_

Somewhere in a very far-off corner of his mind, Vincent heard the violent thud before he felt it. Awakening, he blinked and cleared his double vision to focus on the tack. In his hand moments before, it was now driven cleanly through the forehead of the paper girl. With a quiet, "Oh," that might have sounded more surprised if he had felt fully aware, he stepped back and studied the image as though it were a work of art created by someone else. The pin was pushed far into the cork, and its head was close to popping off from the force with which it had been slammed into the board. His right arm ached.

Vincent stared, blinked once, twice, and then stepped forward and removed the pin with a stunned expression, awed that he had put it there in the first place. Truth be told, there wasn't much of a reason for it.

(_Just because other people go throwing around love like it's on sale doesn't give you the right to be a jerk…)_

The tiny scrap of paper fluttered to take its place amongst the scattered piles on his desktop. He scooped it up with his other hand, replacing the pin in the meantime, and held it for a moment, cradling it as thought it were a small, crying child. He felt a need to apologize for hurting her, even if…

Vincent shot a look at the doorway, began to step forward, and paused as he briefly considered bringing the sketch inside. Something inside him made him opt to leave it, though he set it gently back on the table. He felt unable to bear throwing it to its previous forlorn position on the floor, even if the temptation did lurk inside his subconscious.

(_You just can't do it, can you?)_

It felt much like he was leaving his heart behind on the table.

With the rest of the junk.

Having confronted the enemy and lost, Vincent exited the greenhouse feeling a creeping dislike for the entire structure blooming in the back of his consciousness. He threw a look of utter disgust over his shoulder at the half-dilapidated structure and wanted to continue walking away, but he stopped to look some more and decide just what the whole wreck stood for.

_(Maybe some things… really aren't worth anything…)_

He was remembering again.

_(Maybe some things are just lies.)_

("…_I am on the first step… Now I am on the second step…")_

Lies.

He would take the place down, he decided on the spot. Eventually. His mood might change before he came up with a satisfactory way to pull it off, but Vincent didn't think so. He almost physically shuddered, trying to resist the urge to turn and face the mansion looming behind him. That would leave him with only _there _to live. But maybe he'd grown used to it. Staying there, inside there, as much as every cell, each miniscule fiber of his body was screaming with a longing to escape. Vincent Monroe was stubborn by nature. The world didn't want him, and he would let it have its childish way. The feeling was mutual-- he didn't want the world either.

And after all, when the mood struck him, he could always take to the concrete. Ethan and Trudy could come by one day and have fried eggs for breakfast.

* * *

**A/N: So here's the question of the day: Do I really think Vincent was suicidal? No. Not while he was alive anyway. I think he was likely very sad, but not suicidal. Vincent's too stubborn to be suicidal. ;p Now, after spending weeks and/or months in the Mausoleum, I think _anyone _would want to put themselves out of their own misery. So that's my explanation for you before the e-mails start flooding in screaming at me, "OMIGOD that is SO OOC it's not even FUNNY!" _I do not think he became suicidal until after he was already dead. _There. Point made.**

**Second commentary: If it sounds choppy and vague, it's supposed to be. I imagine all the ghosts' thoughts are. Is it all entirely relevant? I think so. But even if it's not, it's always fun to just pause a moment to delve into someone's thoughts. Anyway, if you're bored, you always have the option to stop reading, right? ;)**

**Third: I acknowledge that not everyone has my freakish memory or is able to pay close attention to detail the first time they read something, so if the "fried eggs for breakfast" line at the end made no sense to you, I'm sorry. I do stuff like that a lot-- that is, make a running theme out of one seemingly unimportant line (insert large number of your choice here) paragraphs ago. I must warn you, I will probably do something like that several more times before the story ends. ^^;**

**I do hope you all understand the metaphors.**

**Fourth: Yes, there are plenty of quotes in here from the actual series. I don't know if it was actually necessary for me to mention that but, yes, they are there, from the comics and the novel. Just citing so nobody sues me. Good. **

**Lastly: Thank you anyone who has reviewed so far! Unless I dreamed it, I think there was someone who actually called this the best BZG fic they've ever read, which made me VERY grateful, because (and I'm sure lots of people say this, but you'd better believe me dangit) I consider myself to be (probably) BZG's biggest fan. I am a BZG FREAK and I am not ashamed. So yes, that...made me happy... ^^;**


	4. Business As Usual

**A/N: Um... I don't have any commentary this time except: (A) sorry for being so long, (B) thank you SO much for all the exceptionally kind reviews, and (C) I DO NOT OWN THESE CHARACTERS. Sadly. The story now commences. :)**

* * *

Dinah arrived at the Mausoleum the following night particularly agitated. She stomped toward the two guildsmen displaying a demeanor that made both fear she would unexpectedly produce a battle-axe from her purse and stopped directly in front of them, her lips turned in a livid frown. Wearing a black gothic dress of ripped lace with her curly coffee-colored hair piled up in two wild poof-balls on top of her head caused the 'unstable level' to rise about five points.

"Why yes," Edaniel dared to joke, "I _would _like a meat pie."

"The _nerve_!" bellowed Dinah with almost enough power to blow Edrear's hair back.

"Of what, might I ask?" he asked weakly.

Dinah crossed her arms and bit down hard on her lower lip. "Well… Now I know for sure that it wasn't all just a bad dream…" She paused for dramatic effect and glared up at the armored boy and cat. "I went to Vincent's house this morning," she informed them. "There is a _gaping hole in the ground _where his _grave _used to be!"

"_Zombies!_" cried Edaniel, his green fur standing on end, clearly alarmed.

"No, you _idiot_, his grave was dug up!" Edrear shouted at him, giving him a quick smack across the head for effect. Turning back to face Dinah he assured her, "Miss Dinah, I promise you we have nothing to do with that. It's Bali-Lali and the rest of the cleaners who go around gathering the bodies for the Metal Maidens."

"I still can't believe you do that," growled Dinah under her breath, frowning at the ground.

"A spirit can't stray far from its body while still on Earth," explained Edrear. "It's absolutely necessary that we bring the bodies here to be close to their spirits. You think we do it for cheap thrills?"

Dinah raised an eyebrow. "No, but Edaniel certainly has the potential to be a grave robber."

"I'll have you know that my _strict moral code _would _not _abide it!" cried Edaniel in disgust. His little kitty nose shot into the air as a bishop's hat popped randomly up on top of his head.

"Then where do you get all those hats from?" Dinah interrogated him with a skeptical look in her eye. Edaniel abruptly became shifty and silent.

"So…" said Edrear. The uneasy silence that had just settled in was explanatory enough. Time to get some work done.

"Erm…" began Edaniel hesitantly. Having to bring the matter up was awkward. "Where do we go then? I mean, since we've got one we haven't really…done anything yet…in the…"

"He said he'd be expecting us today." The voice was Dinah's, whispery and solemn. Her eyes were facing her shoes-- pointy stiletto boots since she hopefully wouldn't have to do much running as a maid-- with an expression of mingled dreariness and hope. Hope that he'd rememebr her this time.

"All right then," Edrear acquiesced. "I wish we'd gotten to talk to him more yesterday," he commented. "Now we've pretty much got to start from scratch, like a brand new one."

"We wouldn't _have _to do that if you hadn't scared him off with all your creepy questions. You could've been more subtle." Dinah's verbal attack was a clear result of her irritation toward the Mausoleum's staff in general that day, due to the matter of the grave digging. Unable to start a fight with Bali-Lali, she seemed content to harass Edrear in her place.

"How do you know it was _me _who insulted him? _You _didn't say anything to him at all!"

Dinah's mouth hung open in a display of outrage. "I…I… I was in _shock_!" she protested before moving onto, "I didn't _ignore_ him, I just didn't--! Do you honestly think I didn't pay him _any _attention at all? Do you think that's why he's like this?" At this point, she sounded not angry but panicky. Not waiting for an answer, she stomped away, her heels poking tiny holes in the soil as she went, toward Vincent's headstone.

Consternation darting across his face, Edrear at first was speechless, then frustrated. "Ugh! Miss Dinah, I meant _yesterday_, not in general!"

"_Edrear's in the dog house!" _sang a nearby, listening feline. Edaniel tut-tutted and then, perhaps in order to keep his teasing equal, added in mock disgust, "_Women_." Edrear kicked him just hard enough to get a yelp and then rushed after Dinah. "Hey! What the hell? You have been frighteningly abusive lately! I'm hiding all the alcohol!" declared the cat before following.

"You know, Edrear," Dinah called back to her companion, returning to the original topic of conversation, "not everyone's problems are solved so easily in one or two nights maximum. Some problems are harder to deal with. They burrow themselves like crabs, way down deep in your mind, and those are the ones that are most difficult to dispel." She paused, thinking about some problems of her own, and how they'd become an irremovable, central part of her against her will, no matter how hard she fought them. "They get in there, and they won't leave you alone, even if the cause finally goes away. They become you and you become them. And sometimes you just can't escape, not completely, not forever."

Despite the outstanding clarity of Dinah's description, Edrear was clearly having difficulty fathoming the concept of purely psychological dilemmas. "But… Miss Dinah…" Physical issues working in conjuction with mental ones he could somewhat understand. Vengeance he could understand. Having grown used to the difficulties of people like Brandon Caine, he had adapted himself to going in, beating the snot out of some unsuspecting villain, and having the spirit instantly explode into white light, at long last fulfilled in his or her bitter desire for revenge. But the matter of Vincent Monroe perplexed him. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him at all. "As far as we know, no one's beating him, are they?"

Dinah spun around swiftly on her heel and almost fell over. "_What? …Edrear!_" she moaned, clapping a hand to her head in frustration. "Geez! …I think we all understand by now that you are a very _physical _person, but there _are _different personality types, you know!" She shook her head and puffed some air out through her nostrils. Any louder and it would have been classified as a snort. "It's not possible to fix every problem by chopping off the head of the person who caused it! Not _everybody _wants revenge!"

_It's not? _Edrear thought. _They don't? _This was mind-boggling. Who doesn't want revenge?

"Vincent's parents were never _around _long enough at one time to beat him!" Dinah continued. "That was the problem! He's _lonely, _Edrear! Being ignored tends to make us fragile humans _upset_, okay?" The dark-haired girl was sincerely trying to accept the fact that neither tower guardian had a soul of his own with which he could properly feel emotions the way humans do but it was getting more and more maddening with each passing second. "Can't you feel lonely, Edrear?" she asked him as gently as she could.

Trudging along behind her, Edrear considered this. "Yes. A little. It's irritating, unpleasant certainly, but… I can't imagine getting myself quite that worked up over it."

"You mean if your parents--?" Dinah stopped herself short. Edrear didn't have parents. No family at all-- Edaniel and the girls weren't even his real siblings. He probably had no concept of yearning to impress and be loved by one's mother and father. She frowned and felt mingled pity and envy at once.

Edrear shrugged his shoulders in defeat. "I can't help it, Miss. I suppose I'll never entirely understand Master Vincent's depression. I wish I could."

"Actually, you probably don't," Dinah warned him.

"Maybe you're right."

They had reached the model. The minimized mansion sat, decrepit and gloomy, deep in the heart of the graveyard, looking terribly lonely despite the mutitude of other headstones around it. Dinah approached it slowly as though it were an animal that might run away, with arms slightly outstretched as if to hug it. She stopped in front of the small stone door and shut her indigo eyes, pondering the epitaph.

_("Show for each stone heart there's one that's kind.")_

She certainly felt stony-hearted at the moment. Dinah had come here with a sense of guilt and heartbrokenness swimming in her stomach, making her ill. But at the same time, cutting through in brief flashes like the sun on a cloudy day, she would feel a joyous expectation so light and floating, so relieved, so grateful. She would get to see Vincent again! Yet through all these overpowering emotions, through the sudden filling of the hole in her heart that took place when she looked upon the headstone, she realized she was being even worse than before, shouldn't have felt grateful or happy. Dinah had the feeling that she might have played a part in Vincent's winding up in this cesspool of tormented, temporarily damned souls, and now she was gleaning pleasure from his pain! Sometimes when she thought of this-- and she had thought of it quite a bit in the last twenty-four hours-- she would despise herself to a degree that seemed impossible, like a heavy weight dragging her down deep into an ocean of boiling hate that, though she should have suffocated and drowned long ago, kept her alive long enough to abhor herself some more. And then the incredible sorrow at the fact that he was dead, that he was depressed, the expectation that he would eventually be forced to leave her again. And, out of the blue, the bliss again, lifting her high above the clouds, the fact that he could be hers again for a time. It was enough to make her wonder if she was bipolar. Dinah made a mental note to do her best to control these odd mood swings in the event that Dr. Morstan decided to drop by.

"Are you ready?" Edaniel had sauntered up behind her and leapt onto her shoulder unexpectedly.

"I think so," she mumbled. Accepting her failings as a friend-- _Was _this her fault?** --**was something part of her would never be ready for, Dinah supposed. But the mending process couldn't start soon enough for her. And after all, she'd handled far worse in her late-night adventures at the Mausoleum. Right?

Edrear came up behind her and gave her a gentle nudge to remind her of what she was supposed to be doing. With a lurking sense of fear, caused by faint traces of accusation she could swear were visible in the carving's eyes, Dinah advanced toward the house.

The door swung open and the darkness inside loomed over her as she stepped through the miniature stone archway. _Dead, dead, dead, down into the grave with him, like him… _Her thoughts were fleeting darkly through her mind, making her feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic in the pitch black square. _Do I deserve to be dead like you? Do I? _Two purple-blue eyes darted around in the blackness of the tomb. _Down here, I belong down here. My depression got better. Yours got worse. I gave it to you. Yes, like a disease, it was only transferred, like a germ. I gave it to you… _The ideas were fantastical, illogical, and yet in some twisted way they managed to make sense to her. _Maybe he'll be better today, _Dinah hoped silently to herself. _I feel sad today, more so than in a long time. Maybe I took some of it back, the depression, the sickness. Maybe he'll be better… _Was that the euphoria coming back, creeping up behind her, ready to pounce and send her into a dangerous imaginary dream world that could come crashing down around her any second and take her frail, cracked heart with it? Yes.

Impatient, she crept closer to the split in the house. One of Dinah's eyes would have been visible from the other side of the crack had anyone been there to see it. The new light flashed in at her. Edrear pushed the door open and she crawled out into the open air, spinning to see the doorway of Vincent's little house. She suddenly exuded joy, like water bursting from a broken fountain. _Yes, yes, he'll be better today. He'll see me today, he'll remember. How could he not remember? _Dinah was almost smiling. The greenhouse, a mental painkiller-- what wonderful memories it brought her! _How could he not remember us?_

_Us, us, us… _Was there an echo somewhere? That word didn't seem to want to dissolve back into her fractured thought process.

"Come," instructed Edrear, taking her arm. Dinah didn't know what made her do it, but she instinctively shook him off and allowed Edaniel to leap into her arms instead. Edrear didn't spend long being insulted. Back to business. "Trudy, remember?"

"Yes, Ethan."

"I want my name to be Ibbenflidgerwiggy!" Edaniel requested.

"Whatever," came Edrear's uninterested response.

Up the hill, across the lawn, which was beginning to become overgrown and shriveled from lack of care, down the winding brick sidewalk and then--

_Oh, _thought Dinah helplessly. Just "oh."

Edrear rang the bell and made a mental note to inspect Vincent for bruises. Dinah huddled eagerly behind the tower guard, ready to leap into her best friend's arms if allowed. Edaniel impatiently hummed elevator music in a little red busboy cap.

Footsteps echoed rapidly behind the blurred glass doors. Vincent made his way down the steps from where he'd been located in the family room that lacked a family at an amazing pace, but slowed down as he came into the entryway. He was scolding himself internally, angered by the way he'd allowed himself to dream while gazing disinterestedly out the second story windows. Dreaming didn't solve things. It couldn't turn back time or fix what couldn't be fixed in a million years. A half-drowned wish couldn't transfigure reality to make that his mother coming up the walk--

(_No! SHUT…UP!)_

It was true that the woman did resemble her, though, from a distance. Vaguely.

What was her name?

_(Trudy.)_

That's right. The one he shook hands with.

_(That's completely irrelevant. Shut up.)_

Vincent waited for about a minute to give the illusion that he'd taken a leisurely stroll to the door rather than sprinting idiotically like an excited puppy. Then he crept silently up behind the glass and squinted through to make out two heads and a set of pointy Chihuahua-like ears. Caught between the need to sigh wearily and the exact opposite desire to smile, he took a moment to collect himself before opening the door and poking his head out above the doorstep. The gardener eyed him nosily as before. The woman and the cat were grinning crazily at him. He couldn't decide which Cheshire-cat smile disturbed him more. These people were going to be visiting every three days. Should he cheer in response to the fact that the chance at some company had blessed him at last or shoot himself through the head? A tough question.

He decided to be sparse with words, remembering what a fool he'd made of himself the day before in his effort to appear… What was it he'd been going for? Not ready to dive off a balcony. Ah, yes. That was it.

"Come in," said Vincent nonchalantly, an expert at concealing his thoughts as long as he was concentrating on it.

At this, the maid's face seemed to drop off and shatter against the step like a porcelain mask. The gardener released a grunt. The cat just meowed pleasantly and gawked at him. All three stepped past him in their tiny cluster, heads turning in unison to follow him with their eyes, much like those sheep from _Toy Story_. He'd decided-- shooting himself through the head sounded like a very good option at the moment.

Dinah opened her mouth, but Edrear tugged her by the arm in a circle to face him. "Don't say anything that will give us away."

"Why shouldn't I?" Dinah hissed at him like an angry cat, keeping her volume down as low as she could. "I want him to know it's me! I want to make him feel better! I--"

"I _genuinely think_," Edrear insisted, "that he's put up this screen image for a reason. If I were you, I would test the waters first before completely blowing my cover."

Dinah snarled at him. "Then leave us alone. I can test the waters myself, Edrear, without scaring him off like last time!"

"Please don't be that way, Miss--"

"Oh, shut up! Just leave me alone!" she whispered forcefully at him, stomping one heel for effect.

The other two inhabitants of the front hall watched the scene curiously from a distance. Vincent at last looked down to find the cat gazing up at him with one eye squinted. After a few moments, it winked. Vincent flinched, unnerved.

"Come on, B-- Ib." Edrear, or Ethan, had come to claim Edaniel. Scooping the feline into his silver-plated arms, he made his way crankily toward the front door. His brother flopped comfortably like a limp noodle in his arms, clearly enjoying the free ride.

"Your cat's name is _Ib_?" Vincent couldn't help but ask.

"_Ibbenflidgerwiggy," _grunted Edrear through gritted teeth. "I'll go take care of that ivy." That said, he exited and slammed the door loudly shut behind him.

"What's his problem?" the blonde boy asked, turning to face Dinah.

The brunette shrugged innocently. "Ethan's always scroogey. How have you been doing?" Her eyes looked friendly, and she smiled kindly at him. It almost made him suspicious. Then he chased the paranoia away.

"Fine," he shot the generic answer at her too quickly. Vincent's number one interest was to avoid conversing with the maid as much as he possibly could. The fact that he was inexplicably drawn to her disturbed him. Her equally unusual interest in him concerned him even more. When Trudy had failed to either respond or walk away, he was at last forced to add, "How're you?" after too long a break.

The tension was awful. Dinah's facial muscles were beginning to grow sore from smiling stupidly at him. She wanted to shut herself up, stop talking like a ditzy blonde housecleaner in a French-maid's uniform (for this was unavoidably how she had come to imagine herself), and throw herself at him, shouting into the atmosphere how much she missed him, begging him to tell her what she'd looked over, giving him all the attention he deserved. The emotion was overwhelming, almost enough to drop her to the floor in a heap of useless remorseful moaning and sentiments.

"Splendid, dear," Dinah told him.

They blinked at one another. Almost against his will, Vincent instinctively took a step backwards. "…Help yourself to coffee, ma'am, while you're--"

"Trudy, please," insisted the woman across the room in that sugary-sweet voice of hers.

"Right," replied Vincent uneasily. "I'll get out of your way, then…"

"Oh, no!" yelped the maid as though she'd been slapped. Vincent froze in his tracks and almost jumped a few inches in the air in surprise. Trudy's hilarious porcelain doll grin returned. "I'd like to have someone to keep me company."

"Oh." _Well, _Vincent thought irritably at her, _that is not my job. Please clean my house and go away. _Another part of his mind hissed rebelliously, _That's not what you want, _and he hissed back at it, _Shut up_, as that was the most creative response he'd come up with all day. Sad, really. Cornered by the two parties-- the one inside and outside of his head-- he blurted, "I,um…guess I have nothing better to do."

_(You could draw more eyes. Or imagine that Trudy--)_

_(Stop.)_

_(--is--)_

_(I know who she looks like, okay? Just stop!)_

Trudy clapped her hands together and smiled. "Thanks." She cocked her head inquisitively like a kitten hoping for a treat and asked, "Where should I start?"

_Wow, _thought the snidely disruptive corner of Vincent Monroe's brain. _How adorable. She must be the good twin. _The other half blatantly ignored the first. "Upstairs, I guess," he answered her. "That's where I spend the most time, so no point cleaning up all this junk until later."

Trudy nodded, started off for the steps, and, with a subtle tilt of the head that was barely noticeable, checked out of the periphery of her vision to see if he was coming. Weird.

He followed her without question.

* * *

**Wow. I think maybe Trudy reminds him of someone. Or that COULD just be ME... (oozes sarcasm)**

**In other news... Edaniel's new name is apparently Ibbenflidgerwiggy! XD **

**More coming EXTREMELY SOON. I PROMISE. REALLY. ^^;**


	5. Another Graveyard

**A/N: Um... I don't have any commentary this time except: (A) sorry for being so long, (B) thank you SO much for all the exceptionally kind reviews, and (C) I DO NOT OWN THESE CHARACTERS. Sadly. The story now commences. :)**

* * *

"Teardrops," said Edrear, gazing blankly down at the tiny glass shards that littered the floor.

They were inside the greenhouse, which was of course where Dinah had instructed them to look the night prior. It was to Vincent's credit that he had come up with a concept of the greenhouse that was noticeable even outside the realm of his personal issues. The ambiance of a graveyard was palpable even to Edrear. He knew what type of aura a graveyard should possess; he lived in one, after all.

The piles of objects, rusted and broken, were bodies, rotting unburied above the ground without a single random passerby compassionate enough to give them a proper funeral. Fallen leaves and loose papers flitted through the air like ghosts at each gust of wind. And, as the tower guard had so insightfully put it, the glass on the floor was made up of scattered teardrops, frozen cold by the sheer inattention that pervaded the area.

"Ugh," groaned his brother from across the room, entirely unappreciative of Edrear's efforts at profundity. The green kitty was too busy pilfering an old crystal candle holder to care. "Quit trying to be poetic. It's tacky… Hey… This'll fetch a pretty penny."

"Stop," begged Edrear, mortified. "Haven't you picked up any manners in the 764 years you've been alive?"

"Relax, bro. I'd say he has more than enough stuff. …Wow, who knew he was an obsessive hoarder? Kid must've been off his rocker after all." Edaniel paused to clap a paw over his snaggle-toothed mouth in mock horror. "Oh God! I'm doing just what the press did to Anna Nicole Smith! …Oh well." He broke into a chuckle and proceeded to magically stuff an antique china plate into his Abraham Lincoln hat.

"I wish you could be just a little more considerate," grouched Edrear quietly, crushing his way through piles of knickknacks and tangles of ivy that had dropped in through the hole-filled ceiling.

"Feeling sorry for Vladimir now, are we?" asked Edaniel, intrigued. "This is new."

"_Vladimir," _Edrear snorted inaudibly in amusement and then replied simply, "I can feel regret."

Edaniel rolled his eyes. His brother just wouldn't give up, would he? "Sure you can."

Offended but not willing to start an argument, Edrear let it go. "I never hated him."

"Well, whenever I'd mention him at home your ax would start grinding against that whetstone like no tomorrow. Weird habit you picked up. I used to make bets with Elala over whether you could get the thing to spin off its axel if I got you pissed enough--"

Edrear, who had genuinely failed to notice this, was appalled and slipped instantly into denial. "I never did that!"

"Sure you didn't."

"Quit being sarcastic with me and pay attention to your work! …_Don't you roll up that rug!_" Edrear commanded threateningly, and Edaniel stopped in mid-motion before slipping the intricately-designed antique into his prop briefcase. The feline shrugged and pranced over to the fountain, where he sprang onto the edge, paced for a moment, and then unexpectedly struck from above and ate a wriggling fish whole. (He might have gone for a bird too, but they had all gone.)

Edrear, meanwhile, frowned and turned in a circle, cat-like eyes absorbing the depressing wreckage that had once been so lovely and serene. "I'm not sure what we're supposed to be observing here. Miss Dinah made it sound so critical."

"Probably just wants a general report. She'll understand anything significant." Edaniel would likely have gone for another fish had the one he'd just eaten not been one of the only live ones left. The green feline departed from the edge of the pond, wrinkling his nose at the smell.

With the look of someone observing a very absorbing painting, Edrear looked down at scattered birdseed, lonely and uneaten. Most of the water had evaporated from the birdbath, and he doubted it was because of the extreme heat. _It's been this way for a while, _he realized, and took the fact immediately into deep consideration. "Should it be in this much disrepair?" Edrear was voicing his questions aloud, as though an answer would come falling out of the sky. He grunted in frustration and spoke to an imaginary Dinah. "We're just his co-workers! How are we supposed to know what's a clue and what isn't?"

"I think this is one."

Edrear "hmmn?"ed and spun in the direction of the nasally voice to face where his brother was sitting atop a paper-covered desk set looking down. He approached and peered over the cat's shoulder to view a small pencil sketch which, after a few moments, he was able to recognize as a representation of their charge. Through its forehead, he saw, just to the side of where Edaniel's paw rested, was one clean puncture that somehow reminded him of a bullet hole. Ouch.

"_What _did she _do?_" queried the cat-creature under his breath, completely stunned.

Edrear closed his eyes and opened them again, and then leaned further down to study the image more closely. "I must say, I wasn't expecting this," he admitted. Vincent had adored Dinah. It gave Edrear a bitter taste in his mouth to think of it for reasons he couldn't explain, but he remembered exactly the way that boy had looked at his pained little angel. He'd done things that borderlined on clinical insanity to keep her out of harm's way-- lunged at creatures three times his size, gone head to head with total psychotics armed with axes-- and now here…

Edrear rubbed at the back of his neck. Perplexing.

"The kid's gone completely psycho," Edaniel decided, nodding to himself. "It's starting to creep me out."

"He has not," Edrear scolded Edaniel for his rudeness. "But he's angry. Definitely." He stared at the ceiling pensively. "I wonder why."

"Well… We aren't gonna tell her, are we?" Edaniel looked fearful of one of Dinah's meltdowns if not one of Vincent's, no matter how crazy he was convinced the boy had gone.

Edrear shook his head. "No. I should say not. She's…" He thought back to the night before, of the way Dinah's eyes had gone wide and her pupils large at the idea that she could be involved in this mess. "She's under enough pressure already." Edrear tugged the picture out from beneath his brother's paw and held it in his hand. "But now I'm curious."

Edaniel shifted side to side and murmured, "Can we get out of here? Place weirds me out."

Edrear chuckled and questioned, with an edge of sarcasm, "What? You don't want to pillage anymore?" No response. He frowned. "All right. Like you said…just a general report." The armored boy dropped the drawing and let it fall back onto the table, then took one last look around before following his brother outside.

…But what could _she _have to do with this?


	6. Always A Woman

**This site is being so ornery today! I can't get it to do anything right! (growls) I'm sorry for any massive typos or weirdness. Seventy-five percent of that is this software's fault. It puts things in italics, chops stuff out, mixes it up... I don't know what's wrong with it. It can't be something I'm doing, because I'm not doing anything any differently from how I've always done it. (confused) **

**Anyway, I don't own these characters. I don't own "Always A Woman" or "Hello" either. I also mentioned _The Haunting of Hill House. _Nope. Not that either. I own NOTHING. I am but a sad, strange little fanfic nerd who owns NOTHING. Now that we've settled that, the story continues... **

* * *

She made small talk with him. Or tried to. He hid like a rabbit during hunting season, and mostly he sat stiffly in that chair trying not to look at her. That chair facing the fireplace, underneath that _portrait, _that _thing. _

_It's creepy as hell, _Dinah thought as soon as she saw it but resolved to stay in the same room with him as long as he would let her. This, sadly, wasn't very long, not only because of his aloofness but because she wasn't at all convincing-- this room, unlike the rest, happened to be very clean. It was the oddest thing. Nearly spotless. Logically, the maid had needed to find somewhat dirtier places to search for hints.

But any clues seemed to lie in that room or with him. Due to the way Vincent would clam up or flinch whenever she got too close, almost as though she would burn him, the only thing about him that stood out to Dinah was that he was not in any way deformed, something which was a rarity for the Mausoleum's patrons. That, though, could have been completely coincidental, so she decided to ignore it altogether for the time being. After a while, Trudy gave up and moved onto the next room, which was noticeably more abundant in filth and also, she noted with curiosity, sheet-covered.

_I thought he spent most of his time up here. Why is it all under sheets? _Downstairs, maybe. The parents' room, yes. But _every single room_ excepting--? _That one. With the painting._

It didn't take Dinah long to abort her search for answers in the other rooms, at least for a while. She slunk quietly back into the den when she was sure he had gone and made perfectly certain that he wasn't in hearing distance before she shut the door. It creaked softly and clicked, and with that she turned around and took it all in.

Clean. All of it was immaculate, she observed once more with significant wonder. Why? How?

No sheets.

Dinah's eyes swept the room. Every mantle was shining mahogany wood, free of dust, free of sheets. You could see your reflection in the reddish-brown surface in line with the rest of the parading faces--smiling, indifferent, fake, real… And pictures on every one, all in expensive-looking, shining metal frames, mostly silver, some gold. Not a speck of dirt on one of them, no sign of time's passage whatsoever, no signal of forgotten decay. All that was strikingly absent in the rest of the house, as Edrear had originally noticed and later remarked to her, seemed to have accumulated here as though drawn by some mysterious, magnetic force.

_(The heart of Hill House? Ha-ha.)_

And then there was _that_ thing. The portrait. Ick.

_(How can he _stand_ this thing? This is the room he picks to hang around in, with _this_ in it?)_

He perplexed her. Then again, Vincent tended to be a confusing person. Why was she surprised?

Dinah was drawn inexplicably toward the hideous thing_-- Hugh Crane. Oh, that is just too rich. --_and gazed fixedly up at it for a few moments before being forced to turn away. The woman made her nose wrinkle to look at. Something about her expression grated on Dinah's nerves; she couldn't place exactly what. And the man-- he just made her want to shudder. A somewhat younger version of Vincent kept his eyes upturned toward his parents with an expression of something like perplexity accompanied by half-hidden appreciation, as though astounded that either one had turned up there to begin with. She couldn't blame him. Dinah shook her head.

Below the painting was another shelf, directly above an electric fireplace, and on it, along with various, rather generic-looking snow globes--_ Boy, what a functional gift,_ thought Dinah sardonically_. --_sat a short paper stack. Each piece was small and rectangular (and somewhat crinkled, she noticed), and it only took her a fraction of a second to recognize them as telegrams. Dozens of them, probably spanning months, or even a year, all perfectly aligned in a neat little booklet that looked as thought it had been leafed through quite a few times.

_Hmmn. _Dinah felt something small and sneaky tug inside her chest, and next a sensation that felt like the curling of a sheepish kitten's tail low in her stomach. A little heat rose into her cheeks. Guilt, she realized. She felt like some horrible invader who'd crash-landed in an extremely delicate world she could unintentionally crush in one hand. Dinah didn't want to be such a snoop, but this was her job. It was just that…

All the telegrams, all the pictures, all together, kept so nice.

She sighed sadly and briefly shut her eyes. The reality was that he missed them, she knew, and he didn't want her to. And here she was _staring _at it (something he for some bizarre reason considered shameful) like it was her business when it _wasn't_, and she just felt--

What was that?

Dinah turned her head toward the door, from which direction she thought she could begin to hear, faintly, the tinkling of piano keys. It took her a moment, but she smiled.

__

(There we go…)

Such a beautiful, welcome sound. She hadn't heard it in a while.

Unable to help herself, Dinah/Trudy creaked open the door and entered the hallway, tiptoeing towards the sound of the music-- _Where is that room again?_-- until she could clearly decipher the melody, which sounded infuriatingly familiar but refused to reveal itself to her. Intrigued, Trudy involuntarily hummed under her breath as she approached. By the time she found her way to the source, she was absolutely sure of it.

__

("She can lead you to love; she can take you or leave you. She can ask for the truth, but she'll never believe you. And she'll take what you give her as long as it's free…")

Dinah's eyebrows furrowed and the kitten swished its tail shamefully between its legs once more.

__

("Yeah, she steals like a thief, but she's always a woman to me…")

She only realized how loud her humming had become when the music stopped with a starling abruptness and the notes coming from her own throat echoed dazedly after it. She cut herself off, mortified. "I… Hello," uttered Dinah awkwardly from behind the half-closed door. No answer. Blushing profusely, Trudy entered the room with her head bowed.

Vincent was fixed in a stiff posture on the piano bench, one finger incessantly tapping at the wood. Unsure how to react to the invasion of his privacy, he let the silence continue for almost a full minute more before managing, "How are things going?"

Trudy tilted her head indecisively side to side like a confused animal. "All right, I suppose. I was just…"

"Was it bothering you?"

The questioned startled her. "What? Oh no!" she chuckled. "No, I like it, you're very good--"

"Because I can--" he began to say before Trudy could finish her own sentence, then stopped in the middle of rising from his seat and plopped back down. He looked so taken aback that Dinah wondered if he'd been _hoping _for an insult, if only for an excuse to leave.

"No," she repeated herself, on autopilot. "No, it's okay, I…" Dinah searched for enough courage to be very forward, and she managed an enticing smile. "I'd like to hear you play," begged the maid sweetly, batting her lashes at him like a little girl wanting an ice cream cone.

"You're silly, Trudy," chuckled the blonde boy at the piano bench halfheartedly. In all honesty, he felt far more agitated and strangely violated than amused in any way.

"But I want to--" pouted Trudy.

"Not with you in the room."

"Oh, well, I'm going to go back out in the hall and clean," she assured him.

Vincent frowned at the piano keys and blurted quickly and firmly, "I'd rather not."

Trudy smiled a gentle, coaxing smiled and teased jovially, "Shy?"

Hesitation. Then: "Maybe." He shrugged. "I don't normally…with people around," he grumbled, barely loudly enough for her to hear.

"Your parents don't force you to play for them?" questioned Dinah with a grin. "My au--"

"No," responded Vincent, cutting her off, and neglected to say more.

"No? Not at all?"

Vincent looked at her strangely and then explained, "…I…don't play while they're here. …They don't appreciate the noise."

Awkward silence.

"Oh," said Trudy.

Vincent grunted and looked off in the other direction, hoping she would magically disappear if he put just enough conviction into pretending she wasn't there.

"…My au-- My mom used to make me play for her," Trudy told him, trying to force him into conversation. It didn't seem to be working. "It would get kind of bothersome after a while, but…at least it made her happy," she continued, beginning to feel somewhat disheartened. Two days, and she hadn't gotten him to say _anything_, anything at all. Dinah hopefully cast a furtive glance at her ex-best friend and turned speedily away before he could catch her staring.

"…What did you play?" Vincent finally asked her, seeing that if he didn't respond at all she would never leave.

Trudy's eyes scoured the room for something she could use to maintain the conversation. She glimpsed, out of the corner of her eye, a tall instrument case, and a melancholy expression of nostalgia crossed her face. "The cello," she supplied with a faint smile. Trudy pointed. "Whose is that?" she asked, though she already knew. "You play another instrument?"

Vincent looked up and obediently followed her gaze. "Oh. No. That's my friend's."

"Your friend keeps it here?"

"Yeah. We used to practice together."

"Used to?" Even if Trudy finally felt that she was getting somewhere, down under the mask, Dinah felt secretly nervous. Approaching the touchy topic of herself made her anxious. What if she was the problem after all?

"…She hasn't come in a while," the boy told her. His voice had dropped a few decibels as though, brought to life at full volume, the words would be too powerful.

"…You sound upset," noted Trudy just as quietly, deciding she would get nowhere if not straightforward enough.

Vincent hummed vaguely, feeling unobliged to answer, stood, and stretched absently before stepping away from the bench. He looked as though he might have been heading for the door, and for a moment Trudy felt her heart stop cold with disappointment. Then he stopped and decided to turn back, making a circle around her while carefully avoiding eye contact, to approach the case.

"That _is_ a--?" inquired Trudy, pretending to be excited by the phony coincidence.

"Cello," the blonde boy completed, tenderly running his hand down the leather lid and leaving his streaked handprint in the thin coat of dust that inhabited it.

"She played well?"

"Beautifully," he acknowledged, even if somewhat bitterly for reasons she couldn't yet comprehend.

She struggled not to blush at the compliment. "…Will I get to hear you two play together sometime?" Trudy dared to ask him after a brief pause. She didn't know how exactly Vincent would react, but she needed to know. She needed to know what had been happening, why he'd been inexplicably staying inside the house he hated alone, and why it involved her.

"…I doubt it," he replied softly.

Trudy feigned confusion while Dinah swirled in a frightening whirlpool of inner turmoil. What could be wrong? Why wasn't she _there _for him? Why wasn't she there???

"She isn't coming," Vincent said simply, and didn't know why. The words sounded choked and forced.

"What do you mean, 'She isn't coming--?'" began Trudy hesitantly.

"I mean she doesn't come to see me anymore!" he spat, angered by her intrusiveness. Vincent was pissed now, and more antisocial than ever, despite his unutterable loneliness. He didn't want to talk to some creepy pedophile housemaid who dressed like a teenager. He wanted to talk to Dinah. But Dinah wasn't coming. Dinah wasn't there…

"Well…why would she do that?" uttered Trudy weakly.

"Don't ask me." Boots clacking against the wooden floor, Vincent paced endlessly back and forth. With no destination apparent, he was a lost cause, a ship lost at sea. He wasn't going anywhere. He didn't have anywhere he wanted to go, hadn't for a long time. There were plenty of reasons to run, but no one and nowhere to run to. He stopped in front of the cello case, his eyes burning through it, snarling at the instrument inside as though the inanimate object had been the one to personally offend him rather than its owner. "One day she just _stopped_. I mean no visits, no phone calls, never showing up where she was supposed to be. I thought they sent her to Watertown! I went to her house, and no one answered the door, not even Jane-- well, I guess _she _wouldn't, but… And when I finally got a hold of her--" He stopped himself and put a hand to his forehead, feeling stupid. "Oh, geez, you don't even know what the hell I'm talking about."

"You couldn't talk to her at school?"

The words were like a knife through his chest. He didn't respond.

"Wasn't she there? …Vincent? …Mr. Monroe, sir?"

"Yes." He wanted to throw up. He wanted to throw up, and then shove Trudy's face in it for asking him so many goddamned questions he didn't want to answer and for _tricking _him into answering them. He'd been trying for _weeks _not to think about it. _Weeks! _"Yeah, she was there."

"Yes?" Dinah held her breath. Trudy was gone for the moment. There was only Dinah-- Dinah in shock and in pain and momentarily without any heartbeat at all, not that she could feel.

"…I don't want to talk about it, Trudy," he growled. He looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes, so dull and lightless the last time she'd noticed, were glowing at her like a hungry wolf's in a dark, empty forest that would provide no savior if you screamed when the animal lunged at your throat. Dinah realized with a sudden jolt that it was frightening. She was _scared _of him.

It passed. Dinah blinked and it was gone. His eyes were lifeless again, devoid of hope, and certainly containing no malice. Only misery.

"Oh," murmured Trudy again, unable to find anything else in her vocabulary to suit the moment.

"Hmmph," came from across the room. He was almost comical, but she couldn't bring herself to laugh.

...

"Why all the sheets?" questioned the maid, bringing him to attention.

"Huh?"

"Why all the sheets?" asked Trudy pleasantly, as if the previous uncomfortable moment had never happened, for the sake of continuing the conversation. "They really make the dust worse, you know. You ought to take them off."

"Oh," said Vincent blandly as though parroting her.

"How much longer will they be gone? Do you really need all this--?"

"_Yes_," came as fast and final as everything else that had come out of his mouth that night.

Blink. "Okay." Stunned and perplexed, Trudy couldn't argue. "…So where do you go if everything's in sheets?" Silence. "I mean, if everything's covered…" Nothing. "Um… You-- You just stay in the den all--?"

"Yes." Vincent seemed to have decided this course of action was working for him. Keep things blunt and simple. He stared out a nearby window and tapped incessantly at the ledge, waiting her out.

"Just that one room?"

"That's right." He felt like snapping but didn't.

Dinah spread her arms wide as an indication of the obvious. Surely he saw why this was insensible. "_Why?"_

"Why not?" returned Vincent expertly. "Why do you care?" he added, deciding to abandon politeness altogether. "Go clean." With that he spun around and headed for the door, leaving Trudy standing dumbly in the room's center, like a puppet who'd had its strings cut.

_Stubborn! _Dinah had somehow forgotten about that. Missing someone was like being blind-- it brought out and exaggerated every good quality and erased all the bad. She wanted to help, and he was going to smack her around-- was that it? Feeling newly frustrated, Trudy bristled and sneered at the wall.

Even as he left, Trudy stood stone still, her face a hard mask, as impassive and emotionless as lead. Her eyes followed him to the door, though her footsteps didn't. Vincent looked over his shoulder at her before he shut the door, his eyebrows raised.

"I'll get to the cleaning now, Sir," said Trudy, sounding freshly cold.

"Call me Vincent."

"Call me Trudy."

"…Fine, Trudy." She caught one last glimpse of his eyes, still color-drained and miserable, before the slit left by the door grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared with a tiny click.

Trudy was the one who lingered near the cello case to dust it, but Dinah was the one who, with a sudden urgent need, opened it and peered inside. The instrument was preserved well against the dust. The dark wood gleamed just as brightly as when she had last seen it in the world outside the dream, in his real house.

_(Maybe this _is _his real house…)_

She shuddered as the thought flitted evilly through her mind, wanting to stick there, and shook it off by concentrating hard on the large string instrument in front of her.

_(Her hands, her hands on the neck, on the bow again…)_

Dinah's eyelids fluttered and shut.

_(With the piano behind her, gliding along, like she was in the air. And the cello dragging her back down somewhere low, into a dark place but a lovely place, a glittering, star-filled darkness. High and low, light and heavy, bright and dark, complementary, oh, yes, beautiful…__They sounded so perfect together…)_

The one time that Dinah was always sure to feel as though they were really a team, outside of the Mausoleum that is, was when they played together.

_("Don't try to fix me; I'm not broken. Hello, I'm the lie living for you so you can hide. Don't cry…")_

Her eyes felt moist.

_("Suddenly, I know I'm not sleeping. Hello, I'm still here, all that's left of yesterday… ")_

Her eyes snapped open and the case slammed shut. Light mouse-like footsteps scampered away. The room was empty, but the ghostly sounds of the instruments still echoed threateningly after her from behind the locked door.

* * *

****

Why does Vincent play the piano? Dunno. It just happened. The idea of Dinah playing the cello came from the picture on the cover of the first installment. But I guess the only real _purpose_ to having them play the cello and piano is that it offers them a bonding activity outside the Mausoleum. I sort of wanted to expand the boundaries of their friendship in the story, to give people the idea of that other dimension outside the context of their nightly job. But why did I pick, specifically, the piano? That part was absolutely random. Maybe it's because I play it, and Vincent reminds me a little of myself in some ways.


	7. This Was Impressive

**This site is being so ornery today! I can't get it to do anything right! (growls) I'm sorry for any massive typos or weirdness. Seventy-five percent of that is this software's fault. It puts things in italics, chops stuff out, mixes it up... I don't know what's wrong with it. It can't be something I'm doing, because I'm not doing anything any differently from how I've always done it. (confused) **

**Anyway, I don't own these characters. I am but a sad, strange little fanfic nerd who owns NOTHING. Now that we've settled that, the story continues... **

* * *

"This," Edrear admitted, "is impressive." _Was_ impressive.

"What is it?" called his brother, scampering around a corner after him. Edaniel turned and trotted into a chaotic mess of faded green, shattered brown, and scattered, bleeding black. The winding path was largely overgrown, and rather than going around the no-longer-rounded curves or leaping over newly-grown walls of green, the cat often opted to break through the fragile mess of now-dead plant life.

"It _was _a topiary maze," determined the warrior. A topiary maze-- shockingly intricate to have been formed by the hands of someone so young-- with the occasional sculpture dotting the path. There were marble ones included, but Edrear's favorites happened to be the ones chopped and shaved carefully into existence out of the bushes themselves. He admired the now misshapen form of what might have once been an elephant and snorted. "Doesn't know much about gardening, huh?" What a shockingly open liar the boy was. He could say something so completely untrue to reality and sound totally convincing without even batting an eyelash.

"The kid must've been friggin' Edward Scissorhands." Edaniel interrupted himself to squeal in excitement at what appeared to be the remains of a pudgy tabby cat. "Kitty!"

"I think that was once a pig," Edrear told him.

"Oh. …Kitty!"

"I don't know which is more depressing," Edrear went on, eyeing the broken pottery, the spilt, fertilized dirt, the crumbling olive-brown remains of bush dropping quietly to the ground like discolored snow, "this or the greenhouse." Mostly dead, the bushes looked about to collapse in the breeze. Others were knocked over, decaying silently on the cobblestone. _Another graveyard_, thought Edrear. Just like the greenhouse. Just like the _house._

"Same storm must have broken the pottery," decided Edaniel, stepping cautiously around shards.

"But why does he never…?" asked the other guildsman to himself, taking a sharp, red-brown piece in one hand and humming curiously. "He's let it all die." He frowned and blinked. "Any theories?"

"Better inside in the air conditioning?" Edaniel wisecracked, hiding from the sun under the withered remains of what vaguely resembled a horse.

Edrear harrumphed and exited the maze, leaving Edaniel poking lazily behind for a moment or two before returning to snatch him up and drag him away. "We're going to see Miss Dinah. I think I've seen enough."

"You think we should maybe make it look like we've done something? Pull a few weeds? Although, I guess that'd be _your _job," the cat pointed out with a sly grin, "since I don't believe I've ever seen a cat pulling weeds. Gotta be convincing, you know."

Edrear shut him up. "I doubt he'll be outside to look," he guessed. "I'm willing to believe that boy's been inside the house for weeks."

"He does look rather in need of a tan," Edaniel quipped.

Edrear shook his head and ignored his brother completely, choosing instead to stare up into one of the windows which had its curtains only halfway drawn. There wasn't much light behind them. For all of its sheer volume, there was something about the house that gave the impression of being quite like a cramped little box, small and dark.

"He's let it all die," mused Edrear, "and he keeps himself in there."

"You're repeating yourself," yawned Edaniel, bored.

"What could that possibly represent?" _A penance? _But what would the boy have to be sorry about? _I suppose I don't know him well enough to guess._

"I don't know," voiced Edrear aloud, barely audible, with an air of extreme fascination.

"…Ok_aaaaaaaaaaaay_," Edaniel sang, unsettled by the deep conversation Edrear seemed to be having with himself. "Let's just go inside like you said, so I can take a nice cozy catnap in the sha-- Hey!" yelped the kitty, feeling a yank on his tail as he attempted to leap from his brother's shoulder.

"Not quite yet." Edrear had changed his mind. Peering around the edge of the building from the back, he squinted at the thickening trees at the edge of the property, into which the long gravel driveway disappeared. "I think I'd like to see one more thing."

Edaniel slumped crankily but at last made the best of the situation by looking on the bright side: "At least there'll be shade." He clung to Edrear's neck. "But I'm not walking."

"Get off me," grouched Edrear, shaking the cat off.

Edaniel tumbled to the ground with another cat yowl and tromped away with his nose in the air. "You are just no fun."

Edrear rolled his eyes and set off in the direction of the path snaking into the trees.

He doubted he'd get anywhere fast, but that was partially the point.

* * *

**GASP! Could Edrear possibly be showing signs of _interest _in Vincent's situation? Do I sense a touch of curiosity, or could it be-- no, I dare not think it!-- growing _concern_? Soon all the bees will drop dead, Edaniel will abandon _Playboy_ magazine, and Morstan will develop a sudden and inexplicable interest in ghost hunting, just before the Earth explodes in a fiery inferno, for the Apocalypse is clearly upon us! Aaaah! (runs)**


	8. Wings, Seclusion, and Sinking

**This was supposed to be up with the other chapters I updated a few days ago. It was all written as one chapter, really, but since it was so freakishly humongous I decided to split it into several pieces. This last bit was even supposed to be divided a little, but it wasn't that long, so I decided not to. **

**Sorry if this seems uneventful and useless. I like to spend a lot of time on people's thoughts. Like what Edgar Allan Poe did with scenery-- "..and on the aged, crystal doorknob was a smudge shaped vaguely like the state of Texas..." XD**

**I don't own any of these characters. M. Alice LeGrow does. **

**Finally... THANK YOU FOR THE KIND REVIEWS! :D**

* * *

She checked his room.

Going in, she'd been excessively skittish, snapping her head side to side at every noise. Dinah was almost afraid, due to the way he had acted before, of being hit.

_(Oh, he wouldn't hurt anyone. He's never hurt anyone.)_

Yet she was barely able to reassure herself.

Dinah peered cautiously in all directions once more before slipping noiselessly into the room. It was a wreck, she noticed, but that was hardly abnormal. The place may have been just a tad more ill-kept than usual, though. She brushed her way through crumpled laundry and scattered school papers before stopping, dropping to her knees, and deciding due to some strange instinct to sift through them and find the most recent. Once collected, this was proven to be…

_(That's about six days… a week or so after the day he died.)_

What could have happened within that time?

_(???)_

Dinah briefly considered the fact that Vincent was crazy enough to _dream up_ a week's more work for himself before ceasing to go to school entirely, and tried to repress laughter. It wasn't funny (or at least it wasn't _supposed _to be funny), but if she didn't laugh, she'd probably cry. Dinah opted for laughter.

She wondered if he'd notice someone had cleaned up the papers. She wondered if he even came in here anymore. The room seemed completely abandoned. And he'd basically admitted to spending his time exclusively in…_there._ That _room. _With that _picture_.

Dinah shook her head and continued rifling through the mess (she felt so guilty, but she _had _to). Somewhere along the line, in the sea of unwashed shirts and pants (_Boys_, she thought with mild disdain, _are ridiculous_), she ran across an article of clothing that rang a bell.

_("My shirt doesn't fit too well."_

"_Is that your dad's?")_

_Yes, I think that's it, _she recalled, her eyes half shut, straining her memory. _That's the one. _She allowed it to flop in her lap, almost like a child asleep, and stared into space, puzzled. _But that was a _while _ago. At least a week before he died._

_(How long, then???)_

The idea of his having been this depressed outside of the dream world had not occurred to her. It was totally fresh, and doubly frightening in its suddenness. How long? What had she missed?

_Maybe you should stop_, Dinah told herself chidingly. _You're letting Morstan's textbook definitions brainwash you. So sloppiness and neglect might be signs of depression. Vincent was also a messy person. Big deal._

But why from the time that shirt had been worn? And why school? Why wasn't he going to school? No child, Dinah acknowledged, really _enjoys _school. But Vincent had always been interested. In any case, he wasn't the type to drop out. He'd had too many dreams. Hadn't he?

_Maybe too many dreams and not enough hope. _Dinah dropped her eyes sadly. _Yes. I definitely understand that feeling. I can appreciate that. _

He'd never seemed that hopeless, was the only thing. She couldn't get the classic image of him out of her mind-- Prince Charming, complete with whip and jaunty hat, proud without being vain, strong-willed, unafraid, always smiling, always there…

_No one's that strong_, she realized. She was hit with a sensation similar to how she imagined it might feel to have a major organ fail. She felt numb, but at the same time she somehow didn't care, even as a sickly clamminess washed over her, the kind she would always feel coming when she was terribly afraid. She felt stupid, though, as if she should have expected this all along, and that made fear and surprise unjustifiable. _No one's that brave. Everyone has feelings. He wasn't a robot; he was a person. And he had feelings. And you never asked about any of them. You just…took and took and took…_

Dinah stopped herself short and struggled with the strong, suction-y pull that often accompanies approaching tears. She'd cried to much already, and it wasn't helpful at all. Now she needed to work.

She needed to work for her own happiness, and for his.

Dinah crawled around on the floor for a few more minutes, lifting fallen items, observing dusty tabletops, checking under the bed. She discovered almost nothing of interest, just a stuffed goldfish with the name _Skippy _sewn into its side, which she chuckled at and then, overtaken by terrible loneliness, began to cuddle.

Dinah picked herself up, only to take a seat again on his bed, goldfish in her lap, sighing in frustration and pondering silently over how long it may have been since he'd slept there. How many nights had he slept in that cold, impersonal, ridiculously clean jail cell? It was completely out of character, aside from being totally insensible. She could much more easily imagine his sleeping form inhabiting the rumpled, lived-in bed sheets, or better yet, the greenhouse. By all means, that was his natural habitat.

She lied down slowly and snuggled into the mattress, not fully understanding why. She supposed she liked being there, where he had been, close to some remainder of him that existed before he became _this_. Letting all subtle, niggling embarrassments fall away, she closed her eyes and wished he were lying next to her, aware of who she was, aware that she cared--

She shifted, with a sigh, and something crinkled.

Frowning at the disturbance of her fantasy (sweet and soothing if somehow awkward), Dinah opened one eye and hummed grouchily at the pillowcase before rising to check first underneath of it, then inside. A small slip of paper fluttered out. At first, she mistook it for a tag that had been ripped off, but something about it looked unlikely. Dinah palmed the scrap and turned it over. _Mercury Telegram, _read the jagged-edged triangle. She raised an eyebrow and commenced shaking and then reaching her hand inside of the pillowcase in search of additional pieces. None remained, assuming they'd been there to begin with. How odd.

_(That's random.)_

This anticlimax caused Dinah to flop with a discontented grunt back onto the mattress, frustrated and disappointed.

_(You are TOO SMART.)_

As much as she wanted to remain there cuddling the pillow, however, the Mausoleum employee forced herself up and went off in search of more clues, of which hopefully more than fragments were present.

_(More than fragments of YOU present?)_

It pained her to leave his room, felt as though she were pushing her way through a thick, airless barrier to step out into the hallway, away from any trace of the real him.

_(The real Vincent?)_

The thought kept coming back to haunt her mercilessly. What if _this _could be--?

_(Stop. Please.)_

After a few minutes, Dinah found herself searching for him more than for clues. There didn't seem to be all that many, in all honesty. Only the sheets, and the bedroom, and the _other _room, and whatever the boys had found outside, if that was helpful at all, if it would say anything more than the simple fact that--

(_He's lonely.)_

And that was hardly unbelievable. He'd been torturously alone for a decent portion of his life, aside from her, and Dinah had to admit that she seldom kept good company, at least from her viewpoint.

_(And now I'm not here at all.)_

And what was that about? The paradox of such an obvious effect accompanied by such elusive causes made her want to rip her own hair out. He was lonely. Okay. To what extent? For how long? Why? And why had she been _so oblivious?_

And where _was _he?

Did she even need to ask?

Dinah found her way to the den and peered through the cracked door to observe an isolated Vincent as he leaned against the window ledge, viewing something on the other side of the glass with intense concentration.

_(Is that what you do all day?)_

Dinah felt something in her lower stomach compress and turn sour. He was barely a shadow of his former self, someone who had once seemed so unrestrained, who had relished and adored the world and had hated to be kept inside a characterless box like this one. He reminded her, now, of an animal in a cage-- more specifically, one who was too afraid to leave it.

_(It's not you. It's…)_

She wondered fleetingly-- if confident, outspoken Vincent could turn out timid and repressed, or if mousy, defeated Brenda, for example, could turn out a raging, psychopathic monster-- what the others had been like when they were alive. How had they behaved? Had they become as distorted as her friends had after death? Or was life the real distortion?

_(Who _were_ you???)_

"Hi," she greeted him aloud, tapping the door with just enough force to open it. He acknowledged her out of the corner of his eye and hummed. She couldn't decide if the noise was meant to sound annoyed or entirely dismissive and indifferent. Dinah crept behind him, far enough away to prevent his becoming alarmed like last time, and followed his unbroken gaze.

Vincent watched the birds (a favorite activity in life, too), silently and with an expression of completely enraptured longing. He looked, she thought, sneaking closer to study his face, as though it had crossed his mind now, or at one time or another, to simply reach forward and be taken up with them, to belong to the flock, a family.

Dinah was suddenly overwhelmed.

"You like birds?" she asked with no shortage of hesitance, blurting things stupidly for lack of any inborn intuition that might reveal to her the right words.

Vincent nodded robotically, numb throughout inside his fantasy of being airborne and weightless and only halfway hearing her words. Had he possessed the benefit of full attention, he may not have bothered to respond at all. Too careful. Suspicious. Paranoid even. Awareness of this new (old?) character trait hit Dinah anew, rendering her silent.

"Yeah, I guess I do," he answered her at last, clearly on autopilot. Dinah wondered if he was alert enough to hear whatever she'd say next. Perhaps he was already too far away, half a mile above the treetops with the crows.

"What do you like best about the birds?" she questioned with tenderness in her voice as well as curiosity. Unknowingly, she began to move forward, drawn ever closer by the magnetic force he unknowingly contained.

Vincent shrugged, just barely managing to drag his shoulders up a fraction from underneath whatever force was weighing them down. He felt so heavy and realized, obscure a thought as it was, that he could never hope to--

It didn't matter.

"Their wings I think."

"Oh," responded Dinah quietly. Vincent continued to look up, despite the fact that the blurred, black 'V's had already faded into the distant strip of dark blue that underlined the sunset like the tired circles under both of their eyes. He blinked at the empty air pocked vacantly.

_Are you always like this? _she wondered. A dull ache filled her. If emptiness qualified as feeling, could feeling be emptiness? Was that what was happening to him? Each time she looked at Vincent he seemed to have fallen deeper into this pit of self-pity and isolation, and it reminded Dinah of herself with excruciating precision. _Are you always like this when no one's around? Are you like this when they _are_? Was I not supposed to notice, or am I just too stupid? Am I really as ignorant as everyone else? _she wondered, filled with horror and self-hatred. _Like Morstan? Like Jane? Like half the planet? Those people who _infuriate_ me? _That _ignorant???_

"Why is that?" she went on, feeling that she already knew the answer.

Vincent had a decent feel for the reason himself, but neglected to respond. He imagined that he could still see the crows, as far out of sight as they were. In his mind, they were perfectly preserved, and not black, but a brilliant golden yellow, painted by the sun.

_(I remember you.)_

The color rang a bell, and he almost smiled as he remembered why.

_(You had the right idea, huh?)_

Her face had looked so peaceful as the wind rushed past her, making her hair billow, her dress flutter, as she fell, unrestrained, with nothing above and nothing underneath, at least until--

But then she'd been free.

_(Maybe that's where I got the idea from.)_

Vincent supposed he'd become a bit attached to her. She was the first one he'd saved, and the only one he'd saved entirely on his own; and they had shared a very similar mindset, at least going from what could be judged within that brief amount of time.

_So you're gone now. _He couldn't see the birds anymore, even in his own mind. _Is it nice? Do you have company? _He considered the rest of the flock. _Yes. You do._

"They can…" he finally began fumblingly, "pick up whenever they want to, you know? It must be kind of nice to be able to feel that. To have that ability. And yet they're never…" Alone. _Yeah. _

He couldn't manage to say it out loud, because by this time Vincent had become totally aware of where he was, to whom he was speaking, and what words were tumbling clumsily out of his mouth. Bitterness filled him, erasing any pleasant, dreamy sensation that thoughts of the birds had brought him. And understanding this made the bitterness double. He aimed it all at her. "Are you…_done_?" he asked with clear suspicion and absolutely none of the well-controlled, tactful quality he'd exhibited prior.

Although she'd come in with the intention of keeping herself prepared, Dinah was honestly not ready for the small but hurtful outburst. Rejected once again, she felt past nostalgia and present, lonely doom strangling her, cutting off her air. "You seemed so uncomfortable and upset before," she said, trying to remain truthful. The charade would be more convincing that way. "I guess I wanted to apologize and ask if you were okay."

_So you come and bug me again? _Vincent restrained himself this time. "I'm fine," he insisted, face stiff and unexpressive.

Dinah frowned and felt about to cry. She swallowed and widened her eyes forcibly, fighting the return of the suction. She produced a small cough during her effort to compose herself, and then, "They never are alone, are they?"

Silence. The sky outside the window was painfully empty. He looked away.

"I wonder if they'll find someplace better," Trudy wondered aloud.

_Yeah, I wonder, _thought Vincent with mixed emotions. _I wonder…_

The sky wasn't empty. The world was. This was all the world there was-- at least for him.

_(They'll go off to their better place, and I'll be here...)_

"I hope she leaves here," escaped him unexpectedly.

"…Why?" Dinah breathed after a momentary lapse of silence, suffocating with hurt. _I thought you wanted me back, _she thought, thinking that that had been her hope, the one thing she had clung to-- that he had missed her, that he had wanted her to return from wherever she was in this asylum compartment and ease his loneliness. _Why don't you want me back? Why don't you want me anymore?_

Too caught up in his own thoughts, Vincent didn't question the absurdity of Trudy's knowing exactly who he was referring to without benefit of explanation. "…I don't know." Vincent wasn't being entirely untruthful on this point, but not truthful either. "I just… I hope she leaves."

(_I hope she finds that better place. Maybe at least one of us will.)_

He almost sighed, but didn't. Frowning, he flung the curtains shut with an agility that seemed out of place in his suddenly sluggish nature, turned, and left the room without another word, eager to escape both her intrusion and any urge he might have felt to welcome it.

Dinah was left alone again.

She tried to convince herself that his reaction wasn't surprising. Trudy was a complete stranger. Taken in Vincent's context, she was being completely inappropriate. Still, she found herself wounded and wishing that Trudy's attempts at confidence could be better accepted. But she couldn't expect him to run to her as if--

_(You're not a mother.)_

Ouch.

The thought hurt, both because it was true and because it was frightening that it had come to her at all. _You're not a mother, _Dinah told herself again for good measure, embracing the pain as a warning. _You barely had a mother yourself. You've never had one, so you've had no example, and you don't know how to behave. Stop trying. You're not a mother. You're not._

Why did that feel so right, though? What was it about that obscure, outlandish idea that felt so right? What?

From the painting, from the shelves, dozens of cool blue eyes challenged the competition.

* * *

"We've been walking for half an hour," complained the cat. "I don't think driveways are supposed to stretch on for half an hour."

"I'm aware," returned his brother peevishly.

Indeed, Edaniel was not exaggerating. They had been traveling along the gravel path for twenty-five minutes at least, thirty-some at most. On either side, trees grew, endless carbon copies, with nothing existing behind them but a generic woodland background that, after a certain point, began to take on an almost painted quality. They hadn't heard a noise or had the pleasure of a different view for some time. "This is what I suspected would happen," explained Edrear.

"Then why'd you have to go ahead and waste time _proving _it?" Edaniel demanded, ready for a whine-fest.

"Because I _wasn't sure_."

"Well, are you _sure_ now?"

"_Yes," _Edrear sighed.

"Fine. Let's go back."

Frowning at his sibling's patronizing brand of logic, Edrear huffed irritably and followed Edaniel's comically wiggling posterior in the opposite direction.

_(So you were right.)_

The idea was as engrossing as it was implied and expected. The theme of isolation had been clear as soon as they'd entered the dream, so the complete separation of the house from the world around it was definitely fitting. Edrear guessed that one could probably walk for an eternity and find nothing, so determined was Vincent to stay trapped within his little box. But the root cause of such seclusion seemed so well hidden that Edrear was fascinated and welcomed the dream as a type of puzzle.

_(The parents are always gone_.)

This worked. But inevitably, Edrear thought of the pencil sketch, violently punctured, unaware of the act of aggression that degraded it. It set the entire equation off balance.

_(But then where does she come in?) _

"Edrear?"

"_What?_" Edrear almost hollered at him before looking up and recognizing their location with a start.

"We're back," sang the kitty in an eerie voice before humming a few bars of the _Twilight Zone _theme song.

"So we are," uttered Edrear, mesmerized by the sight. There stood the house, separated from them only by the few yards of grass between themselves and the veranda.

"Five minutes?" guessed the feline. "Three? Not even? …Edrear?"

The warrior blinked and became aware, even from the distance, that the ivy had grown.

_(Curiouser and curiouser.)_

* * *

"He doesn't play while they're around," repeated Dinah with disgust to her captive audience, and then in a mocking, whiny tone, "They don't _appreciate_ the _noise_."

Recently, Edrear and Edaniel had begun to accompany her home. She supposed they felt obliged to fill the void after Vincent's death, and she didn't have the heart to tell them that, despite any supernatural abilities or martial arts expertise, they still couldn't make her feel nearly as safe and secure in the dark as Vincent had. But she supposed that any company was better than none on the long, nightly trek through the woods back to Lyman's. Tonight she used the time to express her simultaneous sensations of sympathy and indignation.

"Some people are just like that," Edrear acknowledged. He sounded as disgusted as she, to a somewhat lesser extent. "They don't appreciate their children. Or they just don't appreciate talent. Or both."

"I felt so bad." Dinah gazed wistfully into the air and remembered a time when her friend had been lively, energetic, full of enthusiasm and hope. He seemed so _hollow _now. "I get this feeling that he hasn't done much of anything for days. The first time he shows signs of interest in _anything _I barge in and squash it, make him think he should stop." She snorted, angry at herself. "It's like the garden. You know, the Monroes used to have a gardener. But Vincent did so much of the work himself-- because he _enjoyed _it-- that it began to seem pointless. He kept giving the guy his money for the longest time, though. Saw it as helping the economy, I think; he was sort of crazy that way." Dinah sighed and realigned her track of thought. "The point being, of course, that he loves outdoor work-- or _did _love outdoor work-- and has never-- I repeat _never_-- allowed the garden to become that disheveled. He loved that thing to death. " Dinah wrung her hands together. "And since when is he too lazy to _run a vacuum?_ The place is just… It's like a _tomb _in there except for that _one spot_. I can't…" She hummed and held her head. "It makes no sense, guys. He just _sits _in that _chair_ in that _room._" She chewed one fingernail anxiously, stopped herself, and repeated one last time, "He _loved _gardening."

"That greenhouse is somewhat--" began Edrear, trying to be helpful.

"It's a dump," completed Edaniel for him.

"Yeah, I saw on the way out…" Her eyes appeared focused on the guildsmen, but they were really far away across the lawn looking into the stone irises of a little boy carved into the face of a house. "It's not right," she told them, speaking almost to herself. "It's not. Something's…"

She filled her lungs with a long, heaving breath, ready to release another tirade of righteous fury.

"I can't _stand _them," Dinah told the guards, sounding overly-theatrical. "I've never even _met _the Monroes and I can't _stand _them!"

"Well, so far I'd say you have reason to," commented Edaniel from below them. "Vincent was a good kid." His point was emphasized by the fact that he'd actually bothered to get their deceased friend's name right. "He didn't deserve to be snubbed that way. I wasn't even aware that was going on. How long have his parents been gone?"

"Oh, five, six months this time, I'd say. Give or take. Longest they've been… They came back for Christmas. That was for little more than a week. No Thanksgiving this year. Flight cancelled. _Supposedly. _I remember him coming over my house to visit-- Well, that was the cover story. Truth is, I think he came over just to get a whiff of the turkey. Poor thing. Jane wanted him to stay, for once, but…" She frowned, looking partially sympathetic and partially exasperated. "Too proud."

"That's despicable." This was the first time Dinah had ever heard Edrear become defensive of Vincent. Truth be told, it amused her a little. "No child should be treated that way. …I do dislike referring to you two as 'children,' Miss Dinah, but you aren't _adults _quite yet, and…" He paused and shook his head, grinding his teeth together. People were contemptible. "He was their son…"

Dinah's indigo blue eyes dropped to the ground. She wanted to mention the thing she'd discovered, something that was probably a random coincidence but had led to a nagging theory that kicked around inside her head with increasing ferocity. Finally, her lips parted and she blew out a puff of air, then wrapped her arms around herself, preparing herself to verbalize it. "He came to work one night in his father's shirt…"

("_My shirt doesn't fit too well…" _

_The comment was incredibly random, and his tone was slightly wary, as though daring to bring the matter up would bring some terrible curse upon him. She took no notice._

"_Is that your dad's?"_

"_Everything else was dirty, so yeah. My dad's."_

"_Don't worry. You'll grow into it." Dinah elbowed him teasingly and grinned.)_

Dinah had thought nothing of it, of course. It was an odd thing to say but hadn't seemed at all important at the time.

_(He looked at her and tried to smile back, but he could feel it becoming more of a grimace and turned away. "Yeah. Maybe." )_

Vincent had sounded just a little perturbed by her statement, as though it would be a bad thing. To grow into the shirt, grow into his father. He didn't want to be close to, didn't want to be like his father… Or maybe she was just hanging around Dr. Morstan too much. Hopefully her insights weren't as quack-tastical as his. Dinah frowned and thought some more. Unable to untangle some of her own twisted theories, she settled for speech again. "He sounded sad…"

"Poor kid," said Edrear.

Pause.

"At least we know what's the matter now," Edaniel pointed out, trying to make it sound like a good thing. It didn't work. The cat's ears folded back and he was silent once more. "Good night, guys," he said eventually. None of them were able to find anything else to talk about.

"Good night."

* * *

Vincent was in the den, as always, slumped in the chair, feeling sick, helpless, and disappointed, mostly with himself. They'd come-- _she'd _come-- and he'd driven them away. He always did. He suspected he always would. The unwelcome thought caused his nausea to increase.

He wasn't himself anymore, when others were around. He wasn't himself when they weren't-- wasn't confident, wasn't awake, didn't have it in him to be friendly or energetic, didn't feel concern for others or even for himself (he could just barely feel guilty for offending her). Only his negative qualities remained-- paranoia, stubbornness, bitterness... He wished he could find it in himself to speak in a way that wasn't hostile. There was so much to say, and so very few opportunities to say it, so few people to say it to. Soon he'd have no one.

He looked up and down, side to side. In every direction, there were the eyes.

_('You have _me_.')_

He groaned and whacked his head frustratedly against the back of the chair a few times in self-punishment. Finally, worn out (he had scarcely any energy because lately he'd been forgetting to eat), Vincent allowed his head to rest in his hands, practically in his lap. Bending over didn't help the queasiness, but at this point he had stopped caring.

_(You don't need anyone.)_

Vincent told himself this a lot of the time, hoping that someday, if he said it with the right amount of conviction, it would magically become true.

_(You've proven that already. You've never had anyone. You survived. You didn't need them after all.)_

But there had been D--

_(You never had anyone.)_

The harsh interruption crushed the promising idea before it had the chance to blossom. Numbness returned, and that was a good thing. Right?

_(You never had anyone. You don't need anyone.)_

'_You have _me_,' _repeated the eyes, and that was enough. It should always have been enough. It _should _have…

In his imagination, the house settled just a bit deeper into the ground, and the ticklish sensation of the ivy growing wildly wound up his spine like a trellis.

Outside, there was a soft rumble, but no one was around to hear it.


	9. Not A Mother

**Commentary is at the end this time.**

**I don't own any of these characters. M. Alice LeGrow does. **

**THANK YOU FOR THE KIND REVIEWS! :D**

* * *

**_Locked in the basement. I'm so paranoid.  
I'm all encased here, and I can't escape.  
And when I look up, Mother's looking down.  
And when I wake up, Mother's not around._  
-- "Basement," Puddle of Mudd  
****_She can kill with a smile; she can wound with her eyes.  
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies.  
And she only reveals what she wants you to see.  
She may hide like a child, but she's always a woman to me._  
-- "Always a Woman," Billy Joe**

* * *

He felt warm. Unbearably warm.

Squirming uncomfortably on the heat-absorbing leather, the boy restlessly rolled over again and again, unaware, in his sleeping haze, of the summer heat streaming through the window on the backs of light beams.

_("Mom?")_

He was aching all over and didn't know why. His brain was mixed up; all the signals were crossing. They were all from different times, different mindsets, made up of different emotions. All were different versions of himself, but in the same situation-- all miserable and aching and wanting someone, not caring who.

_(He felt welded to the sheets by the stickiness of his own sweat. It mingled with the lemon scent that tainted the pillowcase and made him more nauseous than he already felt. The small child curled into a ball and wrestled with the obsessive indecision concerning whether to huddle underneath the covers, hoping a blanket would protect from sickness as well as monsters in the closet, or rip them off and let the cool air touch him. Regardless of what he did, the fever would only switch to chills in a matter of five minutes, thwarting him again and leaving him frustrated. Nothing helped. The discomfort combined with the hopelessness made him roll on his face and groan. It was one of those moments during sickness in which you feel as though you've never been well in your life-- so you can't even hold onto the hope of feeling all right, unable to recall the sensation-- one of those moments that might have brought a less disciplined little kid to tears._

A little louder. "Mom?")

He'd been about seven at the time, with a terrible flu. People died from the flu. Not often anymore, but sometimes. It was possible. He'd known that at the time, but no one else had seemed to care. Oh, it was mostly a case of a little kid being overly dramatic, but it might have been nice to have had someone sit there as though it had mattered, as though the flu were still an illness that was taken seriously, just to humor him. To remind him that it would improve and drown out the nagging chance that it wouldn't, to make him forget where he was and what he was feeling and let him drift off with someone there to make sure he woke up. Because he was only seven.

_("Your mother needs to go out, dear."_

Why she always had to refer to herself in the third person like that was a mystery. Probably as a way of projecting the idea of motherhood outward, outside of herself, speaking about herself as though she were someone else, so that she wouldn't have to be his mother.

He poked his head up above the bed sheets and blinked at her dazedly. It was growing increasingly difficult to keep his eyes open, but he still couldn't fall asleep. He would never admit it out loud, but he wanted her to lie there with him and put him to sleep with her heartbeat. The child tried to drive the wish out of his mind, but his disappointment kept filtering through. "Where?" he asked, and almost cringed hearing it come out sounding like a whine.

"Out," she answered simply in one harsh syllable, sharp and short. After a brief period of silence, she sighed, sensing the approach of another determined 'why,' and explained. "I promised your father I'd meet him for lunch. We never do that anymore. …I promised," she repeated to make it sound like a good thing. She was not the villain here.

Young Vincent grumbled irritably, flung the sheets down, and shuddered.

"Oh, stop it. Doctor says you're fine. You've caught a bug like some thousand other seven year olds this year. Man up." Her tone wasn't exactly snarky, but neither was there much affection present in her banter.

He wanted to hear more humor and less reproach, wanted a cool hand on his face. One hand on his shoulder. Once.

"I don't want to leave you here…" she said almost inaudibly. She sounded less than convincing, like she wanted to accomplish appeasement more than assurance. His mother paced back and forth once, as though tempted to exit swiftly at that moment before he had a chance to complain, then stopped abruptly, still tapping one foot impatiently with a nervous, trapped air he didn't quite understand. "You'll be all right, won't you?"

Vincent mumbled and rolled over, hiding halfway underneath a pillow. Clutching it gave the illusion of pouring his sickness into the fabric. And it felt almost like a human body when held the right way. He nuzzled his face against it and imagined it could return the gesture. It didn't.

"I just never seem to leave the house anymore…" came her voice from painfully far away. She wasn't talking to him now. She had forgotten he was there. Again.

…

He just wanted her to kiss him once, just once.

"You'll be all right," Marilyse repeated, stepping toward the door. He heard the jingle of keys as she removed them from her purse, and a cold, hard feeling hit him like a snowball in the back. It wasn't chills. This was followed by a verdict of stupidity on his own part. He buried his face in the pillow entirely and elected to keep it there-- that is, until he heard a click and a creak. "Wait!"

Her heels squeaked and halted on the hardwood floor. "Hmmn?" It was an undecided sound, representing neither interest nor disinterest. He sometimes wished she'd just pick one or the other so they could both get on with their lives.

With great effort, Vincent pulled himself out of the fortress he'd created from linens and pillows, held out one arm, and flopped clumsily forward before he had the chance to offer the other. She snorted and looked at him with an expression of…

He didn't know what it was. It bothered him.)

It always had bothered him.

Vincent sucked in a deep breath and rolled on his side again, feeling thick humidity close around him like a box. The feeling of sickness so concentrated in his dreams was starting to leak into real life.

_(The ceiling was spinning._

"Vincent?"

Mom? _It wasn't the right voice._ What?

_"Hmmn?" he managed in a low, gravelly murmur._

"Vincent?"

Something landed on him, crawling and itching and buzzing infuriatingly in his ear, and he couldn't swat at the goddamn pest. _Someone else's hand swatted it for him. A fly? One eye opened. The sky. It was the sky, not the ceiling. He was outside._

"Hey! What's the matter? Get up! Vincent???"

Someone shook him gently. It was a gesture coming entirely from concern, but he felt an instant need to recoil from it. Any contact was poisonous. "Stop. Please." His stomach churned with each motion. To move was the most repulsive idea in existence.

"Hey. Come on. Look at me. …Come on!"

He could barely hear her. Her voice kept on going in and out, like bad radio reception. Or maybe the flies were buzzing in his ears again. "I'm okay. I'm okay, I only need to…" Ooooh. He swallowed, but his throat was dry and his mouth sour. Maybe he was the one spinning.

A nasally voice chuckled nervously in the background while the female voice implored worriedly, "Vi? Can you get up? Huh? Please get up."

"No. I mean… I can, but maybe if I-- for a few minutes--" Vincent squeezed his eyes shut after a quick attempt to open them, blinded by light. Suddenly aware of the heat, he groaned softly and curled inward, wanting to retreat further into his own clothing and seek refuge from the oppressive sunlight. The urge to vomit was threateningly imminent.

Without warning, he felt himself being hoisted up, and it seemed as though the floor were dropping out from underneath of him. He lurched forward sickly and almost dropped back down. Vincent cursed quietly and tried to stand straight, exhaling and feeling it become a cough, then a heave.

"Vi? Vincent? It's all right, we're gonna take you somewhere…"

He opened both eyes as much as he could and found himself outside after all. A blurred green shape trotted by, and a navy blue silken arm supported him. A pretty, pale face swam around the periphery of his vision, and a strand of chocolate colored hair brushed against his cheek. "Dinah--?"

"Yeah?" she whispered, her blue eyes wide. Her face was so close. It would have been comforting if it hadn't kept pulling dizzyingly in and out as if viewed through a contracting and expanding tube.

The world tilted to the right, then the left. One hand flew up to his face suddenly, and he clutched at her with the other. "Crap, don't move!" flew out of his mouth before he realized he was speaking.

"What, what is--?"

Splat. Nice.

"Oh… Oh, hey… Come on. …Grab onto me, I'm gonna help you out," continued the girl encouragingly.

Vincent's head was lighter than ever, but every limb was twice its weight. He looked down and felt like he was going to fall right into the pile. He sensed no anger from her but kept fearing it would appear at any time. Humiliation was overwhelming, mostly because it was the only thing he could feel clearly. "I'm… I'm sorry."

"No, it's fi--"

"No, it's all over your… Oh, that's disgusting."

"Sh. Sh, sh, come on," she cut him off, stepping out of her heels and kicking them aside without a thought. "Don't worry about it."

"Dammit, it's on your-- I threw up on her shoes once," he started confusedly, only half aware and unable to maintain a train of thought. He felt himself being lifted by someone and ignored the impulse to resist. "I chucked all over her shoes, and she avoided me for days."

"What are you talking about?" cried the female.

"Calm down, Dinah, he's got no clue what's going on," interrupted the other.

"I know what's--" he protested angrily, feeling as though he were yelling, unaware that it all came out barely a whisper. He stopped when he felt the girl's tiny hand on his face as the terrified chirping of her rising voice faded into the background. It felt familiar to him. He knew her. Dinah.

Dinah.

The breeze became the loudest noise he could hear. Vincent hummed and fell into a cozy blank spell, forgetful of pain.)

He was never safe feeling calm for long. It always started up again. He should have known that.

_("Oh, Christ!" came the shriek from above the mattress, at the end of which he'd taken a nose dive, gagging and shivering. He was apologizing before the bile had finished exiting him, and it all poured out again. He shut his eyes and wheezed and kept on with desperate "I'm sorry, I'm sorry"s all the way through._

"Could you have done that if you TRIED? My God, did you TRY?"

He shook his head violently. "I didn't mean it!"

"Yeah," she stammered trying to sound sincere, but her fury and disgust showed through. Marilyse grimaced and kicked the ruined shoes as far away as possible. They skidded and left discolored streaks across the floor. "Ugh!" She shook her head, looked away from him, and looked back, not knowing what she wanted to do. He knew any impulse she may have felt to put her arms around him was dead already, but it still pained him to watch the look on her face.)

He recognized it now as the type of look one gives a sick child who isn't their own-- pity mingled with revulsion, with the revulsion dominating. Like a child who wasn't her own. She couldn't manage that type of love. She was trying, but it wasn't there. That belonged to other people.

…Like he wasn't hers…

_(She repeated several times, with a sort of forced desperation, that she wanted him to feel better and it was okay because the maid would clean it, so please, please don't look so upset. And then the door shut much too forcefully, and he was lying in the bed again alone and hot, feeling his face get wet and his head throb with nothing to help it. Vincent felt several harsh pangs of disappointment, which he convinced himself was accentuated only because he was sick and not because he was really that easily upset, and then rolled into the pillow, trying to force his body as deep into the fluff as he could to help himself forget about it._

The pillow had no heartbeat, but it was soft and cool and didn't pull away.)

The contrast made him as dizzy as the sickness did.

_("Let me touch him! Please! I want him to know I'm here!"_

Vincent could feel Dinah being pulled away from him but didn't react. Mostly he was simply content that she was there at all. He would've assured her he was aware of her being there, but he couldn't. He was only able to stay awake for a few minutes at a time, going in and out like a staticy television set, and when he was awake, speaking was beyond his ability.

"Absolutely not," an elderly voice scolded her. He kind of wished it would shut up, but deep down he whole-heartedly agreed, or would have had he been slightly more clear-headed. No want of contact could have made him risk allowing Dinah to contract this. Vincent had a whispering, evil feeling that he would probably die, but he could deal with that as long as she stayed in the room with him-- at a safe distance.

God, he wished her face could be near his again.

"I'm sorry, but your friend has been struck by the very same cursed sickness."

Validation. Grand. Although, Vincent was really much too delirious to care. The world was torn apart more and more by the second, until there was just heat and patchwork shapes all knitted together in one huge blurb. It was somewhat like being smothered by a gigantic quilt. The voices were barely distinguishable, aside from one that stood out quite clearly, or as clearly as he was able to make out.

"But we can't get… I mean, how could he…? It's not true!" it sobbed. It was a heartbreaking sound, even to someone who was too trapped in dream land to be sure of the context. He may have tried to pull himself up, wanting to comfort the voice, and then been gently pressed back down by a hand he wasn't familiar with, or he may have just dreamed that. Vincent mumbled something and didn't know what he said. For an instant, he mistook it for someone else speaking.)

The confusion was as real now as it had been then.

_("Mom," the child was whining. "People die, you know, they die from this--"_

"Oh, quiet."

"Stay?"

"I can't."

"Please?"

"I'm sorry, I can't. I just can't. I told you this already!" The voice kept rising, growing more and more frustrated by the second. It seemed to break for a moment, and he couldn't for the life of him understand why she was crying. He thought he heard a soft, bitter plea of "Leave me alone," but decided he had imagined it, or pretended he had. Maybe it wasn't her crying. The voices all kept changing.

"Stay," he repeated. "Please."

"Do you hear him? DO YOU HEAR HIM?" barked a second voice that didn't seem to belong to the moment. "He wants me here! …GET OFF!" Somewhere outside of his mind, in the present day, a girl was fighting another large shape for access to where he was lying, but Vincent wasn't aware of any of this. He was, as far as he could tell, still seven years old with the flu, and absolutely no one seemed to care.

Someone's hand was touching a cool washcloth to his forehead. He still didn't know where he was. There still seemed to be a girl shouting in the background, but the voice coming from directly above him was the housekeeper's. There came a quick jolt of surprise that she was touching him, even with the fabric separating them, which turned into a quiet type of gratitude, at least until she pulled away, leaving one end of the washcloth to flop over his eye. "He's pretty bad, ma'am. I think he's closing in on 102. I'm not sure if we should take him someplace or not." The tone was irritatingly neutral. Vincent was overwhelmed by a strange desire to hit her but could find neither the energy nor the bravery to do so.)

It was possible that he'd been aiming his aggression at the wrong person. Maybe. He didn't know. Vincent had been seven, sick, and confused. He still didn't seem to know whom he was the angriest with now, when he was practically grown up.

_(Pacing. Tapping. All the familiar-- and typically far-away-- sounds that indicated Marilyse Monroe was in the room. "You could wait and see if it drops," she suggested. "…See if it goes down. Don't wait too long, of course, just…" A pause for breath. "I don't know, I'm no good at-- I don't know, Anne!" she burst out without reason. "You decide."_

"But, ma'am, you're his mo--" began Anne unwisely.

"I SAID YOU DECIDE!" barked Marilyse, angry as a way of shielding herself from her own frightened cluelessness, before apparently giving into shame and fleeing from the room.

She hadn't touched him. Not once. Even the housekeeper had touched him once.

Vincent's eyes closed completely, beyond his control, and he fell back into unawareness, thinking the name Dinah, but he couldn't remember who that was. The girl's screaming began again, only this time it was worse-- closer, clearer, more pained, more uncontrolled.

It was very hard to breathe.

"VINCENT?" He saw the shadow of a hand coming down as if to shake him. It stopped, deciding against it, and another sob broke loose from above him. "Vincent? Oh, please… Please don't go! I need you here!"

He felt her nuzzle her face against his and her tears slide down his cheeks, and he remembered naturally who it was. He repeated her name a few times, trying to speak. The pain was there, and strong, but he felt somewhat removed from it all the same, especially when she was close to him like she was now. Vincent mumbled something similar to what she had said, lost himself a little and said something about her being able to meet someone for lunch any day of the week, shook his head, felt sicker, and picked up again. Her breath was hitching uncontrollably now, and it made him feel sore inside, as if some other alien object weren't already doing the job for him.

He vaguely remembered a strained voice asking, "Have you any idea what it's like to a burden on everyone you love?" Looking up at her face, which occasionally blended with Marilyse's but in general was coming slowly more and more into focus, the physical pain lessened and the emotional anguish doubled or tripled.

"It's my fault," she was crying. "It is. It's my fault. I shouldn't have let you come here. It was STUPID to let you keep coming here, oh, Vincent…"

"I can't do _it," came a low, anguished moan from outside a doorway, soft but audible, even if it wasn't meant to be. There was a quick, sharp THWACK heard echoing down the hallway-- a blonde woman from far away swatting irritably at a domestic as one would a fly as the maid tried to reach out a comforting hand. "I can't... You. You do it," requested the voice timidly. And then: "...I said YOU JUST DO IT, GODDAMMIT!" The voice became almost hysterical, with undertones that sounded, in a way, almost envious of something, some skill she didn't have, one of the only things she didn't have. The yell faded into a sigh that was dismal but calm, as if nothing had happened, and then the heels clickclickclicked away, the sound like quick drips from a leaking faucet, taking the place of undignified tears._

"I can't do this," Dinah echoed the blonde. "I can't do this by myself…"

No, don't, _he was begging her inside._ Don't say that, stop, STOP. _His internal pleading grew persistently louder in conjunction with her sobs._ STOPSTOPSTOPHURTSMESTOPCRYINGNOW.

_He managed something useless about how she did her best, which made her cry harder. He thought fleetingly that he would have reacted the same way to such a generic, asinine statement and cursed himself. He tried begging her to stop but found he couldn't speak anymore, and he feared he would have begun crying himself if he could have.)_

Dinah. Dinah who tried and thought it didn't matter. Dinah who cried and said she needed him. Who would look at him and smile on a perfectly normal day and make it feel unnaturally wonderful. Or lie on her bed next to him, helpless and rag-doll-like from the chalk, and fall asleep with him holding her as though he were her teddy bear, or rather she were his teddy bear, completely trusting, content to be close to him, unrepulsed, as though he were a normal person who could be touched--

Memories of Marilyse sank through the happiness and stabbed him painfully, contaminating his pleasant nostalgia. He felt bitter toward her, and then suddenly toward the other one as well.

Dinah, Dinah, Dinah, DinahDinahDinahDinahDinah…

Where was she now?

_(He was finally going to fall asleep. Thank God._

He felt very numb now and tried not to be scared of it. After all, he could feel her body next to his, and that made it acceptable.

Vincent considered-- with what was left of his mind to reason with-- that Marilyse did not know where he was and Dinah did. Marilyse probably would have asked Dinah to take over anyway, and, at that point in his life, Vincent likely would not have objected too strongly. He didn't know how to feel about this reality.

He wanted…???

Someone was whimpering. He'd already forgotten who it was.

He wanted… to sleep.

So he did.)

Vincent was bordering on falling into a more peaceful sleep when he felt another hand on his face, but this time it was different. It was heavily outlined, solid, smooth, and he could feel every line underneath the palm. It was a definite shape and temperature, not a vague, tingling semblance of touch from memory or manufactured dream sensation.

Temporarily aroused from slumber by curiosity, confusion, and some sneaking alarm, Vincent's eyes flitted open and shut. The presence disappeared instantaneously. The light dimmed. He hummed, heard only footsteps as a response, and didn't question it. Light returned, but on the opposite end of the room. A door shut. The room seemed unchanged; he just couldn't remember if that curtain had always been open, or, for that matter, if he was in the right place, or the right time, or possibly what space or time were at all. Nothing made sense-- his brain was still asleep. He shut his eyes again. They wouldn't open again for another thirty minutes, give or take.

This was a good thing for a number of reasons. Firstly, he'd been denying himself sleep lately for the reason that he disliked his recent inactivity and wanted to keep himself busy, and also because he feared the recurrence of dreams like the ones he'd just experienced. Secondly, awakening while the pin-prickingly painful details of the dream were still puncturing, streaming through him-- like thread being yanked out of a rag doll, leaving it strewn in pieces-- would have been as bad as the nightmare itself, would have made him feel pathetic, less of a man, and he'd been feeling enough of that already. And lastly, there was a figure standing with its back to the door, breathing sporadic but full breaths and wringing its hands, overcome by emotion and unable to speak to him, dreaming or awake.

Dinah pressed her hand to her mouth and resisted the urge to bite into the warm flesh to remind her of herself, then tiptoed unstably away, clutching the banister tightly as she descended the stairs for fear that she would fall and not be stopped brutally by the hard, uncarpeted stairs, but instead fall deeper and deeper and deeper into the dream's layers, into _him--_

She _wasn't_ his mother.

And yet there he had been in his dreams, unbeknownst to her, with their two faces so blurred together he could hardly distinguish one from the other.

Vincent would wake up needing Trudy all the more.

* * *

**Somebody's really gotta tell me if I'm starting to overdo the emo factor here.**

**I know anyone reading this is probably angry right now, waiting for the action. But everything I write is very psychological, not physical. The plot's tied together by thoughts, dreams, and emotions, seldom actions. Does that defeat the point of writing fan fiction for an action/fantasy series? Probably.**

**I think I'm becoming very interested in Marilyse Monroe. (Why I named her that is a mysertery. I don't know what it means or anything. I should have called her by a name that means "thorny" or something. ) I don't know if the depiction is accurate or not, or if Marty has even bothered to flesh out those characters in her own mind, but this Marilyse reminds me somehow of my Rachel, and maybe that's why I have a strange sort of fondness for her, even of she is a deadbeat mom. I feel sort of bad for her. She's not malicious. She's just frightened and misunderstood, and not the right personality type for parenthood. She's essentially a child herself, and a whiny, selfish, and immature one at that. But not necessarily inherently bad. I think after that "Always a Woman" concept stuck in my head, I really began unintentionally to pattern her after the song, particularly the "she hides like a child" part. I think she's going to become a big part of this story, which is interesting, because in the book it's Vincent's father toward whom all his bitterness seems to be aimed. …But maybe I'm just thinking in terms of mothers because I'm female.**


End file.
